Cleopatra's Sister

by Penelope Lively

  ‘That’s life, isn’t it?’ said Maureen. Complacently, or so it seemed to an indignant seventeen-year-old Lucy, who did not see why life should be thus at all and considered that those who make it so – feckless husbands, intransigent bureaucrats – should be made to answer for their behaviour. But Brian Faulkner had by now so effectively faded away that he had become simply a series of addresses from which official letters were returned marked Not Known. He had converted himself nto an absence, a hole into which there vanished the whole sequence of inquiries, threats and admonitions. ‘Do you think he could be dead?’ wondered Maureen. ‘No, dear,’ said the social security lady. ‘They’re never dead.’

  The daughters of inadequate fathers all respond differently, no doubt. Lucy, having lost interest in hers by the age of six, became competent, combative and enterprising. Or perhaps she would have been like that anyway. Certainly it is difficult in her case to point to either nature or nurture, let alone to make a triumphant case for either. She would not seem to have derived a vibrant sense of curiosity, a capacity for hard work and a robust refusal ever to admit defeat from either parent or from the hand-to-mouth and airily makeshift circumstances of her upbringing. A mother unwilling or unable to confront a serious question about the nature of the universe was hardly likely to turn out stimulating and inspirational. And yet, and yet … Fatalistic and compliant Maureen may have been, intellectually unadventurous and burdened by children and poverty, but she was also resilient, resourceful within her capacities and a doggedly protective mother. She was doing the two things that any creature of whatever species is required to do: struggling to survive and ensuring the survival of her offspring.

  Maureen’s survival tactic was to keep her head down and weather the storms as they came. She treated the whole process as some inevitable scourge of nature – the defection of her husband, lack of money, the obstacle course presented by the welfare state. There was nothing to be done but grin and bear it, put your best foot forward, and so on and so on. She was the sort of person who makes oppressive regimes possible – to set her within a grander historical context. On a more domestic scale, she was the kind of woman towards whom a man like Brian Faulkner will always gravitate, and she was the preferred fodder of bureaucratic systems. She was the perfect subject for patronage and paternalism: unassertive, unquestioning and equably grateful for anything that came her way. She was also, of course, the politician’s nightmare.

  Maureen did not relate her situation in any way to history or to a political climate. That was not for the likes of her and anyway she was too busy, down there at ground level. When polling days came round she never voted, having forgotten or being caught up in the crisis of the moment. The truth of it, of course, was that Maureen was on the front line, along with Lucy and Keith and little Susie, historical cannon fodder Lucy’s childhood was dominated by mysterious and portentous incantatory words and phrases: the Family Allowance, the Supplementary Benefit, the Maternity, the Welfare, the Town Hall, the Rent Man, the Insurance … And eventually she saw, as Maureen never had and never would, that it was they and the likes of them who were the very stuff of which politics are made – the raw material, the bricks and straw.

  And Lucy, by the same token, was the very converse of her mother – she was the kind governments dread. She was a natural dissident – a sceptic, a nonconformist. By the time she was ten her voice was raised in query.

  ‘Why can’t there be enough houses for people?’

  ‘If we haven’t got enough money for the rent, then why does the Rent Man have to have such a lot of money?’

  ‘If you couldn’t understand what the Benefit Lady was saying, then why didn’t she say it so you could?’

  She became more numerate than Maureen, and tackled the accounts, scowling over an exercise book filled with columns of figures, over the Post Office Book and the contents of Maureen’s purse, ranged upon the kitchen table in neat and inadequate piles. Instead of accepting the recurrent shortfall as an unavoidable ill, she cast a cold eye beyond the walls of the flat, or the rented rooms, or wherever they were living at the time, and perceived things that Maureen did not. She saw inequality rather than an ordained hierarchy, and a capricious system rather than benevolent paternalism. She saw nosy officials and unsympathetic entrepreneurs and perverse regulations. Whoever was presently interrogating or instructing Maureen would become aware of a source of tension: the small figure of Lucy one step behind her, stiff with righteous hostility. The catechism would falter; the interrogator would avoid Lucy’s glare and suggest that maybe the children could be sent out to play.

  This makes Lucy’s childhood sound like some Dickensian purgatory. In fact it was not so at all. She was short of material benefits, but she had a loving mother, admiring siblings, concerned grandparents who did their best to help, and inestimable natural advantages. She was healthy, intelligent and inquiring. She kept up a barrage of questions.

  ‘Why will the fire burn me? Why shouldn’t I lean out of the window?’ – or, shifting the level of discussion – ‘Are there witches?’

  Maureen, for once, was able to answer – this was an easy one. ‘No, lovey. Only in story books.’

  ‘But if there are stories about witches,’ insisted Lucy, ‘then there must be witches, else how could the people who wrote the stories know about them?’

  A good point. And years later Lucy would retain an image of that moment of perplexity and of insight. Her mother at the kitchen sink, in a cloud of steam; herself poring over a picture book, confronted with this imprecise and unreliable frontier between the possible and the impossible. And she seemed to retain also a vision of her own sudden childish view into the accumulating wisdoms of a lifetime – that a point would come when she would know about things like this, that the asking of this question implied something about her own direction and capacities. She could recognize other such moments, elsewhere, when a fusion of emotion and opinion sent a shaft of light towards another time and another place, and she glimpsed herself, a Lucy who was entirely different, and yet eerily the same.

  ‘I thought you were a pacifist,’ said Howard.

  ‘If we’re being made to play this stupid game, then we’re damn well going to win.’

  The continuity of personality is a remarkable business. Is it fostered by events, or impeded? Maureen was to say, fondly, that Lucy was recognizably Lucy from the cradle.

  ‘She’d lie there watching what you were doing and you could see she was asking questions, except she couldn’t, if you see what I mean.’

  ‘Curiosity killed the cat’ – a favourite expression of Maureen’s. Especially where Lucy was concerned. It may well have done – some cats, under particular circumstances. It does not so often kill human beings; Maureen was quite wrong there. An expedient spirit of inquiry is more likely to be a salvation, to lead to survival and prosperity, let alone a more interesting life. It is the prime indication of mental health, which is why it should never be discouraged, even in cats. And Lucy’s habit of query was to make her life as profoundly different from her mother’s as could be. And yet, at one and the same time, it was undoubtedly the thought-provoking circumstances of her childhood which sharpened Lucy’s wits. If Maureen hadn’t had such a rough time, her daughter might have turned out differently.

  Lucy adored her mother. And was maddened by her. By the time she was adolescent she found her mother’s interpretation of the human condition exasperating, inconsistent and plain wrong. Maureen believed that people got their just desserts but also that life was unfair. She was deeply fatalistic but believed that the Lord helps those who help themselves (the Lord in this instance was a purely abstract concept since – rather surprisingly for one so imprecise in her beliefs – Maureen declared herself to be an atheist). She was an avid reader of astrology columns in newspapers and infuriated Lucy, on one occasion, when she put down £5 for a consultation with a fortune-telling lady.

  ‘Why?’ wailed Lucy. ‘You need that £5!’

>   ‘Because if she tells me there’s something nice just round the corner I’ll feel a lot better,’ said Maureen.

  And the fortune-telling lady duly forecast some vaguely defined benefaction and Maureen was indeed cheered up, so perhaps she was right.

  When Lucy’s first boyfriend hove on the scene, Maureen wanted to be told his astrological sign.

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Mum!’

  ‘But it’s important, lovey. We need to know if you’re right for each other.’

  Lucy sighed theatrically. She was fifteen and didn’t care that much about the boy anyway, but everyone else in her set had a boyfriend and in any case she needed to know more about sex. The boy served his purpose for a while and was discarded when he showed signs of taking the situation for granted. The daughters of inadequate fathers may respond differently but they share a certain advantage when it comes to shrewd and detached assessment of men.

  Lucy thought men were fine, but had no intention of getting mixed up with them except on her own terms and when it suited her. She even fell in love, once or twice, mildly and for a few days at a time. By then she had read enough and seen enough to recognize the symptoms of infatuation, but also to know that what she was experiencing was very far from the consuming passion of literature or poetry. She rather hoped that this would come her way eventually, since she had every intention of living a thoroughly robust and ample life, but she was in no hurry. Clearly, that particular eclipse of reason was a hazardous process and you needed to be in the peak of condition to cope with it. Love could wait. And in the event it did, for longer than she had anticipated.

  At around the time of the first boyfriend Maureen took it upon herself to warn her daughter about men. ‘What you’ve got to remember is, there’s men and men. I mean, some of them are pretty well straightforward, but there’s lots that aren’t.’

  ‘How do you tell the difference?’ asked Lucy. A slanted question, this, given Maureen’s own history.

  Maureen considered. ‘Well, it’s tricky. They can be ever so charming. I mean, take your father …’ She saw Lucy’s expression and changed tack hastily. ‘Actually I’m not saying I’m all that much of an expert myself, but the point is, you’ve got to keep on your toes with them. There’s some that’s all right, but the trouble is the ones that catch your eye, as it were, the ones that get you feeling interested, well more than likely they’ll turn out to be the ones that take advantage. That’s what they do, you see, they take advantage.’

  ‘Mmmn …’ said Lucy, who considered that in her case this was unlikely to happen.

  ‘What you’ve got to do,’ said Maureen dreamily, ‘is you’ve got to keep yourself till the right man comes along. I mean, enjoy yourself, yes, have a bit of fun, but in the last resort you’re keeping yourself, see?’ She was by now speaking the language of the magazines she read, and it should be noted that such language and attitudes were already distinctly out of date, for this was the seventies, and chastity had been at a low premium for some while. But Maureen – who was herself thirty-three at the time of this conversation, having made her own mistake about men at an early age – was in many ways an old-fashioned girl.

  Lucy, who read a different kind of magazine, listened to this with a mixture of incredulity and kindly tolerance. She had long since realized that her mother’s advice on most matters was erratic and amateur, to say the least of it, but she usually pretended to take it so as not to hurt her feelings. In this instance she did feel that Maureen was so far out of touch with the current climate as to seem dangerously eccentric.

  ‘You haven’t been doing it with that Michael, have you?’ demanded Maureen, switching to sudden practicality.

  ‘No,’ said Lucy promptly. What she did not mention was that she fully intended to within the next few weeks and was in consultation with her friends about how you got yourself taken on at the Family Planning Clinic.

  If Maureen had been as astute and well informed as her daughter about sexual matters, then Lucy would never have been born, in all probability. An observation that leads nowhere but one that, baldly put, can cause distress. Maureen herself, in a fraught moment, had once announced, ‘If your dad hadn’t happened to come back for a weekend that time because he had the flu and wanted a bit of home comforts I wouldn’t ever have had Susie.’ Susie, hearing this and taking in the implications of her own retrospective annihilation, had burst into a storm of tears. This so filled Maureen with compunction that she started crying too, which in a funny way cheered her up, as it usually did, and the fraught moment passed, as such moments were wont to do.

  Keith and Susie much admired their older sister. They saw that she was possessed of the qualities that their mother lacked, along with a whole lot more of her own, and deferred to her as head of the family in practice, if not in title. They came to Maureen for comfort and for sustenance, but it was to Lucy that they turned for enlightenment and advice. Lucy helped them with their homework, tore into Keith when he went through a bad patch and started truanting, sorted out the bullies who were giving Susie a bad time. She made them street-wise – taught them how to negotiate and survive the daily maelstrom of life in teeming inner-city schools, instructed them in the mysterious codes of adult behaviour and requirements. She was pack leader, dictator, confessor and nurse, according to the requirements of the moment. Neither of them was like her by temperament; Keith was bright but nervous and easily led astray, Susie was phlegmatic and lazy. Lucy hustled her sister and exhorted her brother. And if this makes her appear an intolerable sibling, it must be pointed out that all she was doing was acting as a quasi-parent, in response to some deep-seated instinctive drive of her own. In return Keith and Susie supplied her with support, respect and pliant material – a pack leader needs a pack, a nurse needs a patient.

  Lucy grew up knowing that people are best served by their own efforts. She saw that it is wisest to expect little or nothing and to concentrate your attention on first understanding the system and then using it, while at the same time remaining sternly critical and objective. Maureen, in her way, knew this too and as usual had the phrase for it – ‘You don’t get anything handed to you on a plate in this life’ – but she lacked the capacity to fight back. Lucy, by the time she had progressed from the swarming playground of the primary school to the jungle of the comprehensive, had learned to identify her objectives and to avoid distraction and obstruction. She liked to learn and was prepared to work; in a climate where both these tendencies were derided, she had to establish her own credentials also – as a person who was maverick but also to be respected, who had wits, guts and a temper to be reckoned with. She even had a small effect on that climate: if Lucy Faulkner thought it worth bothering with class-work and O levels and that stuff, then maybe there was something to it after all.

  She was pre-eminently a child of her time, acting and responding in accordance with its customs. She sprang from it, and was shaped by it. She was what she was because she had grown up fatherless under restricted circumstances in a deprived borough of London at a particular point in the twentieth century. But she was also timeless – the product of a certain conjunction of qualities, capacities and inclinations which happen again and again, in any place and at any period, similar in themselves but adding up on each occasion to a unique human being. Lucy Faulkner, this time.

  4

  A Brief History of Callimbia

  So Menelaus may have visited Callimbia. Or, again, he may not – you can never be sure how far to trust Herodotus. But the place is on the map now, and about to become even more so.

  Skip a few centuries. In which the Callimbians got on with the business of procreation, and the cultivation of vines, olives, millet, and of enduring the wayward political climate which is a feature of antiquity. Antiquity. The word conjures up a scene which is both remote and precise, like scenery viewed through binoculars, bathed in golden light and peopled with heroic figures. Well, it wasn’t quite like that, however it may have been.


  57 BC. And we must turn our attention to Egypt, where Ptolemy Auletes was king, a man blessed (if that is the right word) with six children: Cleopatra Tryphaena, Cleopatra, Berenice, Arsinoe and two sons both called Ptolemy. It should be remembered that the Ptolemaic dynasty was itself the product of a long tradition of incest, which accounts perhaps for a somewhat intensified view of the sibling relationship in every sense. One should bear in mind also that at the time a normal and acceptable route to success, in ruling circles, was over the dead bodies of your relations, and thus not be too surprised at the behaviour of this family over the next few years. Ptolemy (father) was obliged to make a business trip to Rome, Cleopatra Tryphaena promptly seized power, only to be assassinated by persons unknown, whereupon Berenice, not to be outdone, stepped into her shoes. Ptolemy, with the two youngest children in tow, hurried home and set about deposing his daughter, after which he had her executed. Six years later he died, leaving the throne jointly to Cleopatra and Ptolemy XIII, aged eighteen and ten respectively. And the rest is what we call history. It is worth noting that Cleopatra, assiduously maintaining the family tradition, engineered the murders of both her brothers and her sister Arsinoe before she was through.

  This is the generally accepted version of events. In fact, this is not quite what happened. There is an alternative account, which explains the legendary charisma of Cleopatra’s sister and puts Callimbia firmly in the mainstream of Mediterranean affairs in the classical age. Berenice was not executed. She was a girl of compelling physical attraction and commanding personality, irresistible to most who came into her orbit and certainly to Rhamades, a captain of the guard appointed by Ptolemy to supervise her captivity and carry out the execution. Rhamades fell in love with Berenice and ensured her survival by substituting a female slave who was duly dispatched in her place and whose body was whipped away and buried by others party to the conspiracy before the deception could be found out. It is interesting to note that Ptolemy must have ignored one of the basic rules of judicial murder – always check out the corpses of your victims – and we can perhaps suppose that the execution of a daughter was a touch unsettling even in the Ptolemaic context.