Free The Seven Sisters by Margaret Drabble Page B

Marys’. I’ve learnt that one too. I like it.
    When I got home, on that first evening, I opened the wine and poured myself a glass and stood and stared out of the high window. I switched on the radio, and found some music. Classic FM. The reception was excellent. I quite like that man who speaks to me in a friendly Irish accent between recordings.
    This was the first evening of the rest of my new life. I was hungry. I hadn’t had lunch. I started to prepare my supper, although it was so
early. I hadn’t brought a grater. I had to chop the cheese up into little chunks. I thought I’d get it all ready, then reheat it in the microwave later.
    When I’d finished my second glass of wine, I hung up the calendar on the wall by the cooker, and crossed off all the used-up days in red pen. I crossed them out heavily till the paper was dented by the ballpoint. I obliterated them. All of January, and half of February. I told myself that I would cross off each day as it came. I would measure out my days.
    As I sat there, on that first evening, I was suffused by a sense of what I can only call keen anticipation. I felt an intensity of anticipation for I knew not what. My destiny had no shape and no direction. It shone before me like the diffused radiance of dawn breaking over an unknown landscape.
    My macaroni cheese was excellent. I ate it with relish. (I tried the vine leaves, but they were horrible.) Then I sat and stared out of the window from my one armchair. Mine is the most urban of views. Instead of the well-tended sloping lawn and the herbaceous borders and the distant glint of estuary that I could see from Holling House, I can see a two-tiered stretch of motorway, and blocks of high-rise council flats with their bright and intermittent lights, and the rooftops and skylights and aerials and satellite dishes and balconies and window boxes and windows of the nameless residents of these streets. Some of my third-floor neighbours hang their washing out on cleverly contrived lines and pulleys, and in the summer they put their shoes out to air at night. I can see geraniums, and a small palm tree in the middle distance, and pots of what Anaïs tells me is cannabis. I wouldn’t know about that, but that’s what she says.
    The house I live in has a long untidy garden, to which I have no access. Occasionally I see a young yellow fox with a white apron walk delicately along the wall. At the bottom of the garden grows a tall London plane tree. Its branches spread on a level with my windows. The tree has never been pollarded, but its crown has been heavily and brutally pruned, and the branches end abruptly, like amputated limbs. On that first evening, I watched the silvery-grey tree in the blue night, and it seemed to me that as I watched the strangest bird in the world
alighted upon it. It was as large as an egret, and its neck was as long as an egret’s. I could not distinguish its true colour in the twilight, but it was a pale bird. I wondered if it had come to visit me from the Suffolk salt marshes. I wondered if it was an omen. It bobbed and stretched and preened itself upon the bough, and its neck seemed to stretch like a snake’s. I peered at it, and its shape seemed to shift and change and alter before my eyes. After a while, curiosity overcame exhaustion and inertia, and heaved me out of my chair, and I got up and crossed to the window – and behold, it was nothing more nor less than a common wood pigeon. I had been observing it through a flaw in the glass of the windowpane, and the glass itself had magnified and melted the form of the bird. I found I could make the bird’s shape change at will. It was not a town pigeon, it was not one of those birds of grey and white with pink misshapen stumps for feet, it was an iridescent dove-grey pigeon of the dark and bloody London woods, and it was roosting in my tree.
    I had power over the bird. It shifted shape at my command.
    The flaw in the glass is always there. Sometimes I sit