The Seven Sisters Read Free Page B

family, and we did not believe in improving on nature. But I was reasonably attractive, and I did not lack admirers. I suppose you might say I was an English rose. Now I look faded and washed out. My skin is weathered, and wrinkles and crowsfeet don’t look as good on a woman as they do on a man. I’m not overweight, but I droop and I sag. I don’t know what colours to wear. I used to look good in pastel shades, but they don’t suit me any more. So I wear navy and grey and brown. They don’t suit me well either, but at least I don’t look as though I have been trying too hard. At least they look appropriate.
    I see I am writing about myself, and not about Andrew. I don’t think of myself as self-centred, but maybe I am.
    I can’t go back into all that old history. I’ll begin with the story of our marriage in Suffolk. We’d already been married for nearly ten years when we moved to Suffolk. It wasn’t a part of the country that either of us knew well, but we were willing to like it there. (I was born in the East Midlands, and Andrew in North Yorkshire.) It was a
new start, for both of us. It meant promotion for Andrew, and security for me and the children, and it was something of an adventure. Andrew’s post was tailor-made for him, and the small Georgian house that went with the job was beautiful. It wouldn’t be ours, but it would be as good as ours, and I liked the idea of refurbishing it and making it look pretty. And the girls liked it. They liked the idea of living in the Big House. They were already fearsome little snobs, our three daughters.
    Andrew was not only appointed headmaster of Holling House School, he was also now the Executive Director of the Trust. The Trust was a philanthropic institution with a not inconsiderable amount of money behind it, invested in the eighteenth century by a Nonconformist banker, principally for the care and education of the blind. (Its terms have been substantially bent during recent years, but there is still a residuary charitable link to visual impairment.) Under Andrew’s management, the Trust prospered and the School flourished. Andrew’s father was a lawyer and Andrew has a good legal mind: he saw ingenious ways of attracting new investment and new pupils without breaching old blind Hamilcar Henson’s original intentions. Andrew was very good at marrying philanthropy and money. He and Hamilcar Henson would probably have got on well, had they inhabited the same time-frame. Andrew was very popular with the Henson descendants. And there wasn’t anything remotely suspect about his management of the Trust, or of the School. So I don’t know why I’m sounding so sour. So suspicious, and so sour. Andrew is an honest man.
    I never really grasped the relationship between the School and the Trust and the Hamilcar Henson estate, in the grounds of which the School stood. Unlike Andrew, I haven’t got a good legal brain.
    Andrew and I met at school. He went to St Barnaby’s, which was the brother school of St Anne’s. He was everybody’s heart-throb, in those days. He was a year older than us, as was correct, and we all swooned for him. We eyed him in church and at school dances. He was head boy, of course. We all wrote about him in our diaries. And I pulled the short straw and married him.
    She counts her friends upon her fingers
    I did like Suffolk, to begin with. It was so clean and airy, after our grubby years in Manchester. I liked the large skies, and the yellow fields, and the spacious school grounds. I liked playing Lady of the Manor, and arranging flowers, and ordering curtains. I had been so tired and so busy, in Manchester, with the two little girls in hot squabbling heaps in a small suburban house, and now they were growing up and the efficient machinery of the school contained and embraced them and took them from under my feet. I didn’t have to worry about domestic matters much. The School provided its own ready-made system – cleaners, cooks, gardeners,