The Bad Sister (31 page)

‘Will you go to Hastings this year?' my father asked Aunt Zita. They had eaten tinned fruit and cream, and she smiled still, her flames having already consumed the boring meal and her insatiable appetite for excitement shining out of her eyes.

‘Hastings?' said Aunt Zita. ‘Doesn't it seem a long way away?'

I knew what she meant, although my mother looked at her almost malevolently when she spoke, as if this new whimsicality was too much to suffer. The blue, ruled bays of the south coast, where Aunt Zita sometimes stayed with ‘old friends', were as far as the Pacific from the rough night outside, and the rocks and the trees.

‘No, I don't think I'll go,' said Aunt Zita.

My mother rose, to show the meal was over. We followed her through the hall, where paraffin lamps had been put on the tables: the trouble at the dynamo was presumably serious. The sitting-room, lit only by candles, gave off all the tedium of the long evenings of the nineteenth century. Caught in their unchanging lives, the daughters of the house played the piano, and coughed, and read poetry aloud in dying voices. Nothing could ever happen to them. Boredom tapped at the window, like a branch, and
the sons of the house filled up glasses of brandy and threw down the King of Hearts on to the floor before grinding their heels into his face. My father's grandmother, in a puckered cap, smiled serenely on her quarrelsome brood, for she had made her suffering into martyrdom. And besides, there was the food to plan every day, and that was perishable: she moved about the house with the ease, with the predictability, of the seasons.

My mother looked around the room, and in turn, a habit she had had many opportunities to imitate, she puckered her lips and assumed a saintly expression. These people – whom even my father must have sensed vaguely, because he moved restlessly in his chair and kept looking over his shoulder, throwing his head back as if he had heard a murmur – came only when it was time to welcome Aunt Zita. But my mother knew them well enough by now. In her way, she could be as strong in her martyrdom, and her sense of virtue, as Aunt Zita with her wilfulness and her fire. My mother took up her sewing. This always infuriated Aunt Zita, who was made nervous by the numbers of pale, unresisting women in the room, and who wanted my mother to talk to her, to prostrate herself before her greater power. Aunt Zita rose to go to bed. She had only one trick to play now – and my mother knew it. There was a pause between them while the piano played a dismal tune, and Aunt Zita's dead grandmother's needle went in and out of the petit-point with a sound like escaping sighs.

‘But even though I'm not going to Hastings I shall leave here on the usual date,' said Aunt Zita.

My mother looked up at last, and at that moment the lights came on. The candles seemed to have no brightness in them at all, and Aunt Zita's fire became invisible, so that her startlingly pale face and white dress made her ghostly. My father looked at her in sudden anguish and once more looked away.

‘It's entirely up to you,' said my mother. But her sense of relief gave pale red spots of colour to her cheeks. The smile of martyrdom disappeared, then resurrected itself as she
remembered that this was still only the first day of Aunt Zita's visit. She sewed on, stabbing the faded wool flowers with blunted fingers.

Aunt Zita went up to bed after some charming farewells. She had been kind to put my mother's mind at rest. But the house was disturbed still at her coming. The rain and wind beat on the windows. The timbers of the house creaked like an old ship. Aunt Zita went smiling to her room, the front room she hated where there was never any sun.

Sometimes Aunt Zita, instead of feasting down in the big kitchen after my parents were asleep, decided to go further afield: then, knowing by the faint movements on the top floor of the house that the maids were getting her ready, I got ready too: an old evening dress of my mother's from the cupboard in the passage, and shoes from before the war, with straps at the ankles. The dress was green, and faded in patches. An artificial rose dropped from the front, like a flag. The dress was stiff, from hanging up so long, and it seemed to force me down the dark corridor past my parents' room, and to walk me up the skeletal, curved staircase to the hushed, higher part of the house. Uncle Ralph's clocks and analysis engines ticked from behind closed doors as I went. He might have been sleeping, or he might have been deep in one of his biological experiments where he slept for a week on end and then not at all for a month, keeping his eyes propped open until the lights in his sight went out. Often he wouldn't greet Aunt Zita at all, until her visit was nearly over. He feared the effect she could have on his machines, with her casual, wonderful powers, and he had run from her room once, along the landing where my father's strange relations were housed by my mother, in terror at her methods. Meals were taken up to him in these periods, and the food was likely to be found untouched outside the door after several days. Uncle Ralph said Aunt Zita had turned it into frogs when he had taken it in, and he had had to throw it out again. Of all things, Uncle Ralph most hated metamorphosis. He believed only in
science – so did my father – and the two of them would spend days on end in Uncle Ralph's ticking room.

On those evenings when Aunt Zita was going out, the north wind waited outside her window, as fat as a full pillowcase, a broad, icy back which would take her to every country, to every ball and café, to anywhere she could stave off her boredom. The maids pulled at her stays, and by the time she turned in her room at the sound of me coming in, she was so small round the waist that that part of her body might have been removed altogether, the wind and starless night blowing in there and leaving her a floating head and shoulders, and a wide, black skirt. Her eyes were glittering. She was putting droplets of jet in her ears. The fire round her was damped down, and the maids were sighing and smiling, for you could still feel the heat from her but it was under control. One of the maids had pins in her mouth. Aunt Zita's hem was being taken up a little – and an arched foot leaped out from under the black taffeta frills. The wind outside moaned and leaned against the house. I thought of my parents stirring on the floor below, dreaming of the timbers of the roof going up into the sky, or the walls subsiding under the vast muscle of the wind. Aunt Zita felt them too, and her foot went to the ground in a stamp of impatience. She had no desire to be found by them, and nor had I, in my mother's old dress and the sandals that had many years ago glided obediently with my father over polished floors.

Aunt Zita asked me where I would like to go, but it was only a formality. She knew the world: I knew the village at the top of the garden, I knew the chicken-run, and I knew the road that led from the village, and was sometimes impassable but which was the only way out of the valley. I knew a map of the world, in the one building that was apart from the village, and that was the school. There Maurice and I stared at the map, covered in inkspots, on the wall above the small bookcase. The teacher had lived in the school with her husband, and then he had died. There were marks of tea on the wall above the map, where
she had thrown her cup at him. There were trees all round the schoolhouse and the view of the valley was poor. Beneath the garden, and the sloping playground, cemented at the beginning of the war, was a buried village, eight hundred years old, in humps under the trees.

‘Shall we go to the ball?' said Aunt Zita. When she said this, her room began to fill with the people who always came with us on these occasions – and I knew she was in her most excited mood, at her most determined to pull back the past, to string herself with light, and sparkling goblets, and the fire festivals where she used to dance.

The people who were coming into the room would have astonished my parents. They looked as if they had walked out of paintings, or as if they must have come from some ancient royal court, because their robes were rich and studded with pearls. Aunt Zita was always worldly: she had no sympathy with the times in which we lived, and she would gladly have sold the village at the top of the garden into bondage for one more jewel, or for a different novelty at her nightly ball. Soon she was surrounded by her troupe. The two midgets in turbans were merchants, and they pulled stones from the silk swathed round their heads. Aunt Zita chose a yellow diamond, which they told her would glint like the sun. Aunt Zita was satisfied, and slipped it on to her finger. There was a woman with feathers on her head dyed to the same false, ugly colour as Maurice's willow-herb and she, like a circus ringleader, was the one who drew Aunt Zita aside, in the direction of the window, and showed her the north wind, chafing just below, saddled and thick with mist it was impatient to throw off. We all followed then – the women with cameo faces and ringlets and the men in coats of shining brocade. The woman with the feather head-dress opened the window, and we heard the wind howling outside for us.

Sometimes it seemed that we'd never be able to get out of the narrow valley. The hills were steep, and although it was too dark to see them they seemed to be pressing in on us,
piled up against the night. Their flanks of quarried stone were where we might end, half-buried. The wind always shrieked as we rose above the house and headed for the ravine, and the cleuchs filled with heather that burned grey in strips in winter. We lurched and tossed, like the flying machines Uncle Ralph constructed and sometimes let loose from his windows. Aunt Zita held me as we passed over the village. We never looked behind us, at the house where the ghostly maids had put out their phantom lights, and which, if it had been seen from an aeroplane high above, would have appeared only as a great shadow, it was so deep in the surrounding valley. We looked down at the village. The ten houses known as The Street, where the farm workers lived, was a grey arm jutting out from the farm buildings. The first frost, brought by Aunt Zita and the north wind, had whitened the fields. On the roof of Peg's shop were two squares of white tiles, like new windows. The road down from the farm, and past Peg's shop to the school, was in blackness. The school itself was a lump, and could have been part of the low, thick wood which grew all round it, blocking the view even of the small ornamental stretch of water at the bottom of the hill beneath the building, and the ruins of the ancient village. Only the cement playground gave a whitish glow, from the frost and the faint starlight.

Peg's shop was visited by my mother and Aunt Zita every time she came, on the day after her arrival and every day after that, as if the transaction of handing money over to someone else might free them from the guilt they felt at the evil thoughts they had about each other. They stood in the shop, visible to Peg only from the waist up, on the far side of the wooden counter scratched with penknife blades: my mother was in a woollen cap that always came out to mark the end of the summer and the arrival of Aunt Zita, and Aunt Zita in one of her extraordinary hats, part felt and part feather, which swept the ceiling the colour of tea from the cigarette Peg never let go. They on the other hand could see the whole of Peg, as she moved about in the ramshackle
shop, searching in shoe boxes for the things they claimed to want. They could see her tiny body, in long grey skirt and grey wrapover cardigan, and her gingery head as it popped up, features confused, among the unsaleable goods. She was never sure if their long wait for an item – a pencil with a rubber on the end, an orange book of stamps, a bottle of ginger beer – was maddening to them, or whether it was part of the ritual. These great women, whose bodies could for all she knew have ended in mermaids ‘tails beneath the counter – or be welded together, like fairground monsters – were for a time at one in the presence of Peg. She was serving them together, she was holding up their walk on the land where there was nothing to buy, only the rows of trees planted by Aunt Zita's grandfather to look at, or the old kitchen garden which my mother had 'let go' because of the war; she was filling in their morning. My mother always took a scrumpled pound note from a leather purse in her pocket, although she could just as well have put anything on account: my father owned the shop. Aunt Zita had a shoulder bag, which I envied – she carried it everywhere, even on visits to the farm. It had powder and lipstick inside, and a smell that reminded me of our magic trips – scent, and a slightly burning smell, like the flares of white fire outside the magnificent houses where she danced all night. She brought out shillings and florins, all new and shining. Peg scooped them into a tin box and gave muddy pennies in change. I felt she liked Aunt Zita's new money, and liked Aunt Zita for it, as if Aunt Zita had somehow manufactured it herself, while she despised my mother's note.

Peg always stayed in the shop, in the little sitting room next to it or in the bedroom upstairs, week in and week out and from one year's end to the next. My mother thought it strange that she never went to the nearest small town, eight miles away – but she stayed in the shop, and the food vans that came to the village were enough for her, and she had no living relations that anyone knew. Because of this, she and the shop came to look more and more alike: even the air in the shop, which was as fusty and gingery as Peg's whispery
bun of hair, seemed to be part of her. Ginger striped cats lay in the old sweet boxes. The lemonade in dusty bottles turned a dull yellow. Toffees as dim as the inside of the shop slid from their jars with a crackling sound on to Peg's dry palms. Because people paid Peg for her goods, and paid her for them in real money, and could even buy real stamps there which would send their news to the outside world, she escaped being considered a witch.

The first ball of the season, as Aunt Zita put it, was always rather a disappointment. I had looked forward to it so long – and had suffered my mother's suspicious, disapproving looks, and the transformation of the house, and a feeling of stiffness in the village so that people going into Peg's shop seemed to examine the sweets with special attention, as if expecting an ordinary stick of rock to turn into a broomstick and carry them when they weren't looking into another world. Perhaps the sudden end of summer brought on the sense of being let down. My father tapped the barometer every day, and the needle swung to Stormy. Aunt Zita stood beside him, and her face was reflected in the glass, with the needle swinging between her eyes. Leaves began to blow into rooms that were never used, and then scattered in packs when a door was opened. At night, before going to bed, my father went round the house trying to catch them, and I heard him trudging about, long after he was supposed to be asleep, running at the leaves and swearing. Sometimes I followed him secretly. And sometimes I saw that the leaves had taken on the shape of rats, with exquisitely stitched waistcoats in gold and dull red, each seam as fine as a spider's thread. They had bright eyes, which flickered in the dark. I saw their shadows as they ran along the landings, and the ludicrous, bobbing shadow of my father as he panted along the wall with a broom. Some blew up the curved stairway and lay in bales of soft and faded silk at the feet of the ephemeral maids. Russet browns and a dim yellow the colour of the mushrooms that grow in beech woods, and the grey of bark-moss
were velvets and chiffons that tore and fell into rivulets and then went into nothing at the touch of a hand.