The Seven Sisters Read Online Free PDF Page B

where she got her confidence or her ideas. The environment was hardly very supportive of her kind of interest or experimentation. And it wasn’t as though she was a striking beauty. In fact, she was rather odd-looking. She was of average height, about five foot four, and of average build, if anything slightly on the skinny side. Her breasts were small and high and far from voluptuous, and her belly was very flat, almost concave. (This we did envy: ‘fat tummies’, as we called them, filled us with an adolescent anorexic disgust. And this was before anorexia was widely diagnosed.) Her hair was a pale light mousy brown and slightly wavy: in later years she has taken to dyeing it in many different shades. Last time I saw her it was a rich dark chestnut, just a little too red to be real. She had a pale dun smooth skin, a sinisterly smooth skin, and a large black mole on her left shoulder. She was made up of tones of yellow and brown and pale pink. Her lips were pale pink, like the underside of a mushroom. Her most striking feature then was her very large, slightly protuberant eyes. They were uncanny. They were a light grey-blue and they had a strange, piercing, salacious expression, as though she could always read the worst of what you were thinking. Her eyes weren’t very attractive, but they were compelling. Hypnotic, almost. She painted her eyelashes dark brown and she used blue eyeshadow. We weren’t allowed to use cosmetics at St Anne’s, but she did.
    There was something voracious about Julia. She ate a lot, but she never put on weight, despite the heaviness of the school diet. She burned up the porridge and the shepherd’s pie and the mashed potatoes and the syrup puddings and the piles of bread and margarine and jam. She was restless, and always on the move. She wasn’t very good at sitting still. In church, she was perpetually fidgeting and leafing through her hymn book looking for traces of sublimated spiritual eroticism (she found plenty) and pulling at her gloves. (Yes, we wore gloves to church, in that lost era of good behaviour.) She had too much energy. But she hated sports. Alone of our year, she let it be known that she despised sports. This wasn’t a fashionable attitude, but she got away with it.
    She was also clever. She sailed through exams without too much effort, and took quiet satisfaction in her triumphs. Ours was a serious, old-fashioned, disciplined, ladylike school, and it should have been proud of Julia’s successes – her A and S grades, her State Scholarship, and her place at Bristol, where she was to read English Literature. But Julia made our headmistress and even our broadminded English teacher uneasy. There was something not quite right about her, and they knew it. They were too nice to be openly snobbish about Julia, but they could sniff something in her and her background that they didn’t like. I don’t think they knew about her sexual escapades – she would have been expelled as a corrupting influence had the truth been known – but they suspected them. She made them feel uncomfortable.
    I knew all and possibly more than all about Julia’s escapades, and I also met her background. She invited me to stay with her for a long weekend at a half-term break – I think it must have been Whitsuntide – in the family home at Sevenoaks. I was pleased to be asked, and pleased to accept. I couldn’t go home that weekend, as my father was ill, and my mother reluctant to have me in the house, and I was loath to linger at school, exposed as homeless, with all the other miserable unwanted girls who had nowhere to go. I grasped eagerly at Julia’s face-saving invitation, and we set off together to Kent as on a spree.
    It was very odd. Well,
en effect
, it wasn’t
very
odd. It was just slightly off-key, in a way that I couldn’t have defined then and don’t think I can define now. Julia’s home base was very suburban – her parents lived in an undistinguished 1930s bow-windowed