The Seven Sisters Read Online Free PDF Page A

cards hold.
    (I haven’t played solitaire for two days now. I congratulate myself. Writing is a good substitute.)
    Janet has been cloyingly sympathetic about my divorce, which all too clearly delighted her, and asks me from time to time to go to stay with her. I do not go. But she does occasionally visit my mother in her care home near Lincoln. This I suppose is good of her, as my mother has become very difficult and talks a great deal about Jesus. But you can’t expect me to be grateful to Janet, as I am sure she has her own selfish reasons for going to see my mother. Janet is now a big, plain, jolly woman, square and stocky, with a double chin and a round face and a head of bouncing grey curls and a belly which
sticks out like a kitchen shelf. She still calls me by my school nickname, which annoys me. I am grown up now.
    It’s hard to believe that Janet, Julia and I were ever a threesome. But we were.
    Julia once suggested that it was Janet, rather than agricultural subsidies and bad harvests and foot-and-mouth and the motorway bypass that drove Dick to the bottle. I wouldn’t know about that. Maybe Julia goes around telling people that it was me that drove Andrew into the waiting arms of Anthea Richards. And who knows, maybe I did.
    Julia Jordan is another matter altogether. Julia is rich, and Julia is famous, and Julia is a wicked woman. Julia lives in Paris, and she threatens to visit me soon. Julia is free. She is free to come and free to go. She is as free as a bird. She too was delighted by my divorce, though she was able to be much more open about her delight than Janet, being several times divorced herself. She approves of divorce. She never liked Andrew. She always saw through Andrew. She danced with him once when she was fifteen, and although she was flattered to be singled out by him, she didn’t succumb to his slick vain well-mannered celebrated charm. She was cool about Andrew. We thought then that she was pretending to be cool, but now I think that she knew what she knew.
    Julia was always a shocker, even at school, though I don’t think any of us expected that she’d ever go quite so far as she eventually went. We were easily shocked, in those days. ‘Juicy Julia’ we called her, with admiration. How ugly and inappropriate schoolgirl slang is. I’m sure girls don’t call one another ‘juicy’ now. I don’t think it is a word my daughters have ever used. But, then, sex has become so commonplace these days. They call everything ‘sexy’ now, even quite inappropriate things like investment portfolios and computer software and electrical egg whisks. (At first I thought the thing about the egg whisk I heard on the radio on a food programme was some louche double entendre, but no. It was just Stupid Speak.) Sex was rare, when we were young. Julia was our pioneer. She went out, into all those dangerous places, and came back and told us about them. All the ‘juicy’ bits. She would entertain us with them, at night, after Lights Out. Julia seemed to lack some kind of moral sense. She simply didn’t think that what she was doing was wrong. Kissing,
petting, heavy petting, letting the hands rove over her body, letting the fingers enter her body. We were all so timid and priggish and frightened. We listened spellbound to her stories.
    There wasn’t much scope for sex at school, as we were closely supervised during term time. Our parents paid good money for that supervision. Those formal school dances came but twice a year, one just before the Christmas break – ‘The Winter Assembly’, it was called, for some forgotten reason connected with the old days of the old town’s social history – and one at the end of the summer term, which was known as ‘The Leavers’ Ball’. Serious impropriety at these time-honoured, public and carefully orchestrated events was almost unthinkable. We were all very well brought up. All our sex was in the head and in the pages of our diaries, and even there it was