The Seven Sisters Read Online Free

a matron, a secretary. I felt less housebound because the house was not mine. I walked the dog along the riverbank. I have always liked walking by water. Occasionally I helped out in the School, in one way and another, but I did not involve myself deeply in School affairs. It was not an arduous life. I was able to be gracious at public events, when called upon to be so. I was quite good at that. I went to concerts and I presided over wine-and-cheese parties. It was all rather unreal but not unpleasant.
    I allowed two women to befriend me. I had two friends in Suffolk. They were – indeed they still are – called Henrietta and Sally. I use this passive construction to describe our relationship because I cannot remember any moment at which I made any friendly step towards them. They co-opted me, and I failed to prevent them from doing so. That is how it happened. I have always been a passive person.
    Yes, I had two friends in Suffolk. I suppose they still call themselves my friends, although I have left them and Suffolk and moved to this foreign land of urban barbarians. Henrietta is the wife of a solicitor in Bury St Edmunds. She works as a volunteer with the partially sighted. We still had a few of those at the School, though the supply of suitable blind paupers has begun to dry up of late. (That is one of the reasons why Andrew has been so busy rewriting the terms of the Trust.) Sally is a social worker employed by the County Council. Henrietta Parks is bossy, querulous, lank and longfaced. Sally Hepburn is fat and noisy. They are both do-gooders. I used to have a respect for do-gooders, but I do not like having good done
unto me, and I became very suspicious of the motives of Sally and Henrietta.
    Sally and Henrietta overwhelmed me with their sympathy when Andrew played me false and left me. Well, Andrew didn’t actually leave me – he couldn’t leave his post, could he? – but he certainly betrayed me. I was the one who had to leave. I was driven out of what had seemed to be my own home. I went further afield than I was expected to go. I was expected to stay around in Suffolk, in pitiable condition, being comforted by Job’s comforters. By fat Sally and bony Henrietta.
    There was always a large sky above me in Suffolk, and space around me. There were green and yellow fields, and bathing huts, and striped canvas chairs, and blue sky-reflecting estuaries flooding and spreading towards the silver main. I became an expert in cloud formations. I liked the large mauve and ochre and white cumulus clouds that sailed high over the ripe corn, and the long low yellowy-white clouds that lay parallel above the horizon like Magritte baguettes. It was a picturesque landscape, and it composed itself in oil-colour tints and formations. There were pink houses and thatched roofs and windmills and riverbanks and shingle beaches and spiked purple flowers growing in the sand dunes. There were sheep and horses and herons. An innocent, rural, backward, open land.
    Now I live trapped beneath an enclosing grey gloomy London canopy. It is better so. In this trap is my freedom. Here I shall remake my body and my soul.
    Everyone felt very sorry for me when Andrew’s dalliance became common knowledge, when it became clear to the world that our marriage was over. I became an object of gossip and pity and contempt. Everyone loved and admired Andrew, or so the rubric went, and it was assumed that I above all others must love and admire Andrew. Nobody could guess at the relief I might be feeling. Nobody knew of the exhilaration I felt when I realized that I would not have to live with Andrew for the rest of my life. Nobody knew of my secret delight in his public guilt.
    It is terrible, living with a man who is admired by all, when love has perished. Andrew had come to seem to me to be the vainest, the
most self-satisfied, the most self-serving hypocrite in England. That kindly twinkle in his eyes had driven me to the shores of madness. The prospect