The Seven Sisters by Margaret Drabble

Author:Margaret Drabble [Drabble, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141969602
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2011-08-24T04:00:00+00:00

PART II

Italian Journey

They assemble for their departure

You know that land. You have an image of that land. All the cold and bitter children of the cold north have an image of the warm welcome of that southern land. There the palm and the cypress cut themselves out in antique shapes for your delight against the blue sky and the noonday sun. Those are the very shapes and patterns that are carved upon the antique heart, and you know them as your birthright. From generation to generation, they imprint their shapes upon the human heart. It is the land where the pale jasmine blossoms in the sweet night air, and bright lemons hang like dim and secret lamps amidst the glittering and the gloss of the ever-green. It is the sunny clime where you breathe more freely both by day and by night, where your fearful lungs fill gently with the soft air, where you no longer huddle and shiver and wrap yourself into your own arms and clench yourself back into your own self. There you no longer need to dread the threshold between the body and the world, for all is mild, all flows easily, all is lightness. Your shoulders are without burden, your eyes are clear, your skin is soft, and your feet in their sandals are free. You stretch out your arms, you can see your toes. The sky is vast and blue, the sand is golden, and the horizon shimmers with pledge and with promise. You know that land.

That magical land awaits them now. Its dunes and its citrus and its oils and its jasmine await them. Their as yet unknown guide Valeria awaits them faithfully like a tall sentinel on the far shore. Queen Dido gazes from her battlements across the centuries for their approach, for she knows that they remember her. Remember me, she cried, and, against so many odds, through so much forgetfulness, through the death of so many empires, they do remember her. They keep their tryst.

The weather swirls and pulses in rapid coloured garish modern swathes around the turning globe, and around the globe we try to catch its passing, on screens, on charts, with laser lights. But it will not stay for us. It moves on.

A light northern English rain is now falling over the railtrack and the desolate brick arches of the Stansted Express, over the tender striped sowings of the spring green fields of Essex, over the busy bands of the carriageways of the M25 and the M11, and over Stansted airport, but nothing can dampen the spirits of our little band of travellers. They know that they are to fly southwards to that promised southern land, towards the sun. They do not know that the storm clouds are gathering over the Alps, and were they to know this, they would not care. The lightning may flash and the thunder may crash, but beyond those snowy peaks and that vicious howling in the heights, the sun’s assurance awaits them.

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