The Seven Sisters by Margaret Drabble

and stare through it for what seems like hours, making the outer world shift, marginally, at my will.
    There aren’t so many birds in London. The sparrows are dying or disappearing, nobody knows why. The omnivorous pigeons and the predatory magpies survive. I would like to visit the birdless lake of Avernus. Where no birds sing.
    Why am I so certain that something exciting will happen to me in London? How can it, at my age? And what will it be?
    I should feel powerless, but I do not. I feel more powerful than I did when I was married to that good man Andrew, the pillar of his community, the admired of all observers. I feel more powerful than I did then when I was a new and beloved bride, than when I became three times a mother and could rule over small lives. I cannot explain this sense of power.
    One day soon I intend to put this sense of power to the test and buy myself a Lottery ticket. This will be a first for me, like so many things in my new existence. I’m not sure where they are on sale. Do people buy them at the post office, are they to be found at the
newsagent’s? I think it will be a question of First-Time Lucky. I haven’t decided yet what to do with all the money. Anaïs may have some ideas. She has known riches in her time and she is still by temperament a big spender. She will be pleased when I win the jackpot.
    Sally Hepburn will not be pleased. Sally wants me to be miserable. Sally wants to come and pry into my misery, and to report on it to those false friends in Farlingham. I should never have said she could come to this flat. What shall I give her for lunch? She’s a fussy eater, although she eats so much. She has fads and phases. One year she is a vegetarian, then she suddenly decides she can’t eat milk products but can accept white meat. One year fish is forbidden, the next it is the cure to all health problems. She even went through a phase when she decided she couldn’t stomach wheat. It is all nonsense. These whims are designed only to swell her sense of her own importance. They are designed to make trouble for other people. Macaroni cheese is safe, isn’t it? I can’t remember what her position is on milk products at the moment, but I think she ordered a pizza last time we met in the Gallery, and it was covered with cheese. I pointed this out, and she didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. She said she’d always liked cheese. So she must have decided dairy products are all right. And they are what she is going to get.
    She introduces her friends in their persons to this story
    Suddenly my thin life is thick. It has filled up. Sally has been to lunch, and I have survived her visit. And Julia Jordan is coming to see me next week when she is in London. My social life is almost too busy. Activity attracts activity.
    A pleasant middle-aged woman in the sauna at the Health Club spoke to me this evening. She asked me where she could find some scales to weigh herself. I couldn’t help her (oddly, I don’t think there are any scales in the Ladies’ Changing Room), but it was good to be asked. We spoke a little about the merits of the Steam Room. She said she had high blood pressure and was not supposed to spend too long in the heat.
    Then, on the way back, the elegant young man with dreadlocks who lives under the bridge spoke to me. My face must have been
open, not shut. And so he spoke. He said, ‘Good evening, Ma’am, and how are you today?’ He was drinking cold Heinz chicken soup straight from the tin. I said I was fine, and that I hoped he was comfortable on his foam bedding. I gave him one of those new two-pound coins. He seemed quite pleased with it and turned it over several times as though it were a lucky charm. I used to be afraid to pass this man, and I would walk by on the other side, but I do not think he is at all dangerous. I am glad he spoke to me.
    I gave Sally soup, but it wasn’t cold, nor was it out of a tin. It was out of one of those fancy cardboard cartons,