The Seven Sisters by Margaret Drabble Page B

must have thought, from this somewhat unrepresentative meeting, that we pop in on one another all the time. I did nothing to correct this impression. I
am not the kind of person to have close friends who pop in, but I think I wish I were that kind of person, and the illusion of being it is better than nothing.
    I could see that Sally was much struck by Anaïs. Anaïs is striking. She is more than striking. She is spectacular. She ran up the stairs noisily, faster than Sally or I could have managed, and burst in dramatically, exaggerating her breathlessness. ‘Wow, what stairs!’ she cried, as she burst in, puffing and panting and blowing from her carmine lips. I could see Sally looking at her in wonder. For Anaïs is lustrous, and as exotic as her name. She is dark-haired and brown-complexioned, and she dresses in the gaudiest of garments. Even her bathing suit is striped and starred in splashes of mango and canary. Yesterday she was wearing a woollen coat of many colours, banded with green and red and blue and yellow, and cut in a surprising way that managed simultaneously to suggest a nomadic blanket and an expensive item of Japanese haute couture. She was also wearing a scarlet hat with a silver tassel, perched on top of her thick black curls. And her make-up was thick and lush and shameless.
    Yet Anaïs is a lady. You can see at a glance that she is a lady. She’s a different sort of lady from the refined and thoroughbred sort they tried to breed at St Anne’s, but she is a lady.
    I offered her a glass of wine, but she declined. No, she said, too busy, another day, she had to dash. So this was Sally from Suffolk? Heard a lot about
you
, cooed Anaïs in her slightly menacing way, which could have meant anything or nothing. Bless you, my darling, she said to me, as she put the bleed key into her bag. I’ll give you a ring, she threatened, and she kissed me loudly and extravagantly, and then away she flew, clopping vigorously down the stairs and out of our hearing.
    Anaïs wears short skirts and astonishing shoes. They are heavy, thick-soled and clumpy, and they add inches to her already considerable height. They are very smart and come from some designer shop in Knightsbridge of which I can never remember the name.
    I don’t mind it when Anaïs calls me darling. She calls everybody darling, and that’s just fine by me. I don’t think Anthea Richards ever dared to call me darling – it would hardly be proper, as a form of
address to her lover’s first wife – and I certainly wouldn’t have liked it if she had.
    Anaïs, early in our Virgilian acquaintance, decided to decide I was amusing company. And therefore, with her, I can be amusing. She summons up another self for me. She has that power.
    This intervention from ‘my friend Anaïs’ (how proudly I write that phrase) gave a kick-start to my little luncheon party, and I found myself almost boastful about the contentment of my London life. Maybe it was my unsuitable air of self-satisfaction that made Sally drink so much and become so overbearing and, eventually, indiscreet. First of all, she displayed a brutally direct curiosity about Anaïs – who was she, what did she do, where had I met her, what nationality was she, did she always wear such outrageous clothes? Did I know many people like her? And why, when she wore such short skirts, didn’t she bother to shave her legs? I never ask people direct questions because it’s rude. And that last question of Sally’s, about Anaïs’s legs, was rude by any standards. I muffled my replies, but I did unwisely reveal that Anaïs worked in television. I suppose I was pleased to be able to claim to know somebody who works in television, but I should have kept quiet. It was none of Sally’s business. (In fact, I don’t think Anaïs does work in television any more, and I’ve never been quite clear what it was that she did when she did it, but she certainly used to have some professional connection with whatever