The Seven Sisters by Margaret Drabble

gone badly wrong when she was a little girl. The School, of course, got some of its funding from the Hamilcar Henson Trust for the Blind, which made special provision for the partially sighted. That was why Jane had been sent to Holling House School in the first place. Some suggestion was made that it was Jane’s poor vision that had led her to stumble into the water. But poor vision doesn’t fill the pockets of
your school blazer with stones, does it? Poor Jane. She was quite a bright little thing. She was in my class in 3C when Andrew bullied me into teaching French Conversation, that year when Mlle Fournier went back to France in something of a hurry. I remember hearing Jane recite a fable by La Fontaine. It was the one about the timid hare, ‘
Le Lièvre et les Grenouilles
’.
    Un Lièvre en son gîte songeait
    (Car que faire en un gîte, à moins que l’on ne songe?);
    Dans un profond ennui ce Lièvre se plongeait:
    Cet animal est triste, et la crainte le ronge
…
    That’s a long time ago now. Poor hare.
    Jane’s death was hushed up, as much as was possible, and nobody blamed the School administration, or Andrew, or Anthea, or Jane’s dead father, or the School groundsman, or the pond for not having any railings around it. As far as I can remember nobody blamed anybody or anything. I think Andrew got off lightly, though of course I myself was not at all anxious for him to attract any bad publicity to himself or the School. There was a great deal of speculation about why she’d done it, but I tried not to pay too much attention to it. I didn’t listen to gossip. I think I assumed that she’d simply suffered from an aggravated bout of teenage depression. There had been talk of a love affair that went wrong, but there is always talk of a love affair that has gone wrong. Once Sally tried to hint that Jane might have thought she was pregnant, but I didn’t let her enlarge on this.
    Jane drowned herself on my birthday. This was a meaningless coincidence, but the consequence of it is that I can never forget the date of her death. The fourth – or is it the fifth? – anniversary of it approaches. I remember Martha running up the lawn screaming, as Andrew and I were having breakfast. I was opening my birthday cards. I don’t get many. There was one from my daughter Ellen in Finland, which had arrived a few days earlier: I’d saved it to open on the day. And there was a card from Julia Jordan, which had arrived that very morning. I was reading her message when I heard the screams.
    Julia, as I have already noted, always remembers my birthday. I’ve
never made much of a fuss about my birthday, although I’m so superstitious about numbers and always feel something significant might one year happen upon it. The only person who remembers it regularly, apart from family, is Julia, and that’s because of some kind of flashback school memory. We used to mark birthdays at St Anne’s. Cards, little presents, and an iced sponge cake with candles.
    For my fourteenth birthday Julia gave me a tiny little bottle of perfume. It was of royal-blue glass, with a silver stopper. Oddly enough, I seem to have forgotten its name. It was called something like Eau de Paris, and it had a little picture of the Eiffel Tower on its label. I loved it. We weren’t allowed perfume at school but I used to keep it under my pillow at night and sniff at it secretly.
    I did behave badly and sadly in Suffolk. But I don’t think Jane Richards drowned herself on my birthday to punish me. I don’t think she was thinking about me at all, or about the strange consequences her death would have for me.
    Julia is coming to see me next week. She rang to fix the date. Julia is a wicked woman. I am a wicked woman. Her sins are of commission, mine of omission. Both are grave.
    I wonder what numbers I shall choose when I buy my Lottery ticket, the ticket that is going to bring me untold wealth. I believe a lot of people go by their own birthdays, or by the