The Bad Sister (36 page)

‘Someone could have been killed,' my father said at last, ‘running out to see what had happened. And there are tiles missing on the stable courtyard. In the dark, someone could have twisted their ankle.'

‘But think, anyway,' said my mother, ‘all the people from the village got up and came to beat out the fire. They thought it was a fire.'

‘How?' I said. ‘Where did you see them?'

‘I think Maurice ought to go away somewhere,' my mother said as she looked at me.

‘They were coming up the drive with sticks,' my father said. ‘They must have gone the long way round, down the back road and through the field. They must have thought the stables could already be on fire.'

My father picked up his knife and fork and began to eat. He ground on the chicken as if punishing it for my and Maurice's misdeeds. With his usual practicality and unconscious cleverness my father had staved off two revolutions. This was how he saw his role in the house and on the surrounding land: as a pacifier and steward, only bringing down the fist when incompatible things had got together and had to be forced apart. By making the bell heard, he had transformed the villagers, who were resentful of the
coming winter and the hard fields, into a helping band. And my mother and Aunt Zita, impressed by the sound of the bell, which had blotted out the wind, and which had come suffocatingly into the dining-room leaving a weight that for a time made them unable to speak, were quiet until the end of the meal.

So we finally ate in peace. But as the wind, cautious and sniffing at first, began to rise in the chimney, Aunt Zita turned to my father.

‘I think it was the wind that got at the tongue of the bell,' she said.

At this my mother frowned. Aunt Zita drew a yellow envelope from her bag, which was on the floor by her chair.

‘Whatever it was,' she said in her clipped light voice, ‘the bell has heralded a new arrival. You didn't know Wilhelmina was coming to stay?'

My father and mother rose together, as if some mechanism had sprung them from opposite ends of the table.

‘Nor did I,' my mother said.

I followed Aunt Zita to the hall. There would be exclamations of horror at the telegram. I waited for the night journey over the sleeping village, and the school, and the magenta armies of Maurice's willow-herb beneath us as we flew.

Sometimes, when the big bell rang in that time of the year it meant the arrival of Aunt Thelma. Then my mother would look completely confused, as if the days had run backwards and the earth had tilted, spilling out the summer and sewing up the hole, the jagged rent being where Aunt Zita and Aunt Thelma would, unthinkably, find themselves in the house together. For Aunt Thelma came long after the first dark blue evenings and the north wind, after the Indian summer and the succeeding storms. She came in the politest part of winter, when a thin white frost covered the ground, and Aunt Zita had been long gone, and a few robins walked about on the grassy path, which by then looked like the shaven cheeks of a corpse. The bell that
tolled her coming was low and melancholy. There seemed little hope of resurrection, either for the people who sat in their houses in the village in the long nights, or for my father and his family. The sharp, pointed lines of the hills, and the field flattened into lakes of frost, looked as if they would be incapable of softening and turning green again. Also, when Aunt Thelma came, the stars seemed to be brighter in the night sky, the white fields more ethereal below, as if a map of an unobtainable heaven had been spread out for her approval. My mother walked with her past the sweet-smelling filth of the cows, their tails hanging down over shit flanks and bulging udders, with an abstracted expression she had taken from her sister. The tall, weak-backed firs on the road to the lake half-stooped to her, like acolytes. But Aunt Thelma was fiercely contemptuous of worldly obeisance and pomp. Her clothing was as simple as sackcloth, and the smile she wore for the worldly relatives by marriage who surrounded my mother had all the false sweetness of the smile of martyrdom. It was very seldom that my poor mother found herself in the house with so explosive a mixture on her hands. Aunt Thelma, Christmas and Candlemas had come to be as familiar as the tattered calendar, each month crowned with a fierce loch, that hung in the schoolroom under the map of the world.

But if Aunt Thelma had equipped herself with another job, working in the staff kitchens of a war hospital maybe, frying three hundred and fifty eggs in one batch, cooking lean mutton in the bales of hay in the neglected grounds – then her dates would change and she would come at another time. Aunt Zita, for all the changes she brought with her, was immovable in her visit. Yet, as the end of the war came and evacuees were sent back to roofless towns and the wonderful new future opened, Aunt Thelma joined the Labour Party and her visits became more erratic. After dinner, as she ate her peach in the company of Aunt Zita, she seemed to eat into the peach like a maggot, destroying the glossy bloom and the sweet scent, which always reminded me of the balls we danced at, with Aunt Zita
draped in a cobweb of gold silk. My mother watched them both, sighed, and lowered her eyes. Aunt Thelma's gold was different from Aunt Zita's – it was Christian gold, intangible as a halo. Aunt Thelma's dinner dress, which was like a surplice, was white, with a pale gold frill at the foot. Aunt Zita, scowling at her from her medallion gold, the gold that bought the slaves Aunt Thelma freed, the gold on which her profile was stamped, and the gold that made chains at her wrists and feet when she went dancing, saw her brother's sister-in-law turn her gold to base metal, and shut them all for ever in a world without precious ore, a world of paper equality. She would eat her peach faster than Aunt Thelma, and let the sweet juices flow unchecked down her chin.

My father took me out in the boat on the lake on these occasions of the coinciding visits; and he would sit looking up at the stony face of the ravine, as if searching for an answer. The pagan winds, unbothered by Aunt Thelma's coming, blew into the narrow lake like a funnel. The boat skittered on the water, which was made up of a million ripples as fine as hair. My father sat with the oars flat out on the water either side of him, in a gesture of resignation. Waves the size of minnows rippled under the oars. The winds dodged the boat round the small islands and then out into the main channel again. Aunt Zita's stormy autumn was in full progress. In the stern clouds, grey as fuselage, I saw shreds of night, brought on early by Aunt Zita's impatience to leave the house, get away from Aunt Thelma, and visit the ball. ‘We will have much less than we had,' my father said. But he would say nothing further. He rowed strenuously against the wind, although it would have made little difference which direction we had taken, and steered the boat into its dark kennel at the side of the boathouse. From the rocking boat inside the building, which was like being on an uncertain bed in a dream, we looked out at the loch and the clouds closing in over the hills. Aunt Thelma had shrunk the lake already, and squeezed the valley in her iron fist.

At these times of strain, when half the house had a pious, austere air, and the William Morris printed curtains and carpets glowed with Aunt Thelma's sanctity, and the chairs grew tall-backed and uncomfortable and pressed in with admonishing arms. Aunt Zita's domain took on a tatty, theatrical look, like a child's cardboard theatre. The hall, with its christening scenes and the stained-glass windows that came and went with the flashes of sun outside, the rainbows in those stormy days throwing sudden pietas, blood on the face of the dying Redeemer blazing for a moment before the obscured stables opposite, blue eyes of female saints that danced in the high windows – the hall took on a more delicate appearance, as if the Gothic were true Gothic and the stone-masons and sculptors, as they wrought the thin arches and crusader knights, had been true believers. The clumsy imitation that my father's grandfather had put up, the travesties of purity and faith in the coy, Victorian gargoyles, the assertion of money and power, were transformed by Aunt Thelma. My father's family, if they were seen wandering in the house, looked repentant and bowed.

Aunt Thelma took pity on one of my father's aunts, who had died young after trying to run away with a penniless man, and she sat sometimes with her in a remote bedroom that looked out over the courtyard, the faded chrysanthemums of the late Victorian wallpaper nodding like cabbages when the flickering sun went in there. Aunt Zita's gold, tasselled cushions, and the tables of Venetian mirror she restored to the unused gallery, and the chandeliers which threw bubbles of white light on the walls, looked impossibly vulgar and unnecessary. In the evenings, under the dim lights, while Aunt Zita's fire raged and she tapped her foot on the floor to the sound of secret ballroom music, Aunt Thelma talked to my mother of their childhood in a low pleasant voice. My father was utterly excluded. He looked up at the dead game and piled fish in the dining-room pictures, each framed with the heavy gilt his grandfather had loved, and his eyes were as frozen in surprise at the
sudden ending of life as those of the tumbled birds. Then when he could have had Aunt Zita without my mother caring, he ignored her completely. Perhaps he knew that with the coming of Aunt Thelma, and the stamp of a false winter that came down with her, he no longer had his elder brother as a rival. For Aunt Thelma made sure that Aunt Zita's visits to the nurseries were stopped. In the room where the pigeons waited on branches, and the clusters of berries were half-pecked away by damp and age, Aunt Thelma's religious ceramic had swollen out over the fireplace. Aunt Zita and my father's elder brother, if they tried to embrace, felt themselves turned to porcelain sinners, cracked as Aunt Thelma's Madonna billowed above them in her robes.

The only diversion, as Aunt Zita waited in agonizing longing for the return of the north wind, was a bomber, gone astray from its target, which flew over the village and house and valley. It landed in boggy ground in the high hills above the lake, making a crater that was deep and round with the heather torn away at the rim. When Maurice went up there – to find the bomber, he thought, to rebuild his toy fighter planes with the metal and to look long at the dead body of the pilot, strapped into his cockpit, his dead fingers on the buttons that would have guided him back to Germany – he stood disappointed in the short grass and heather and scuffed with his toe on the fresh earth at the edge of the hole. There was no sign at all of the plane. Nobody, in the heart of the war, would take the time to come and dig it out, and the enemy, and his bomb, and his broken machine were buried for ever in the soft peat above the loch.

The bomber had gone over The Street, and then over the lonely house where Maurice lived with his mother on the side of the hill along from the Hen Pond, and then, after darkening the school where the teacher sat correcting homework, it roared over our garden and into the hills above the ravine. Aunt Thelma and my mother ran out on the lawn. But, in a world that was alive to Aunt Zita when
she was at the height of her powers, and where the sound of the big bell could hang like a black cloud in the sky, there was no after-sighting of the vanished plane. It was an invention that had been superimposed on the real, living world, and had been sent out to destroy it. Aunt Thelma and my mother put their hands up to their brows and craned into the distance, as if cutting off their minds from their eyes would enable them to see the enemy. Uncle Ralph, hearing the commotion from his laboratory in the turret, stood at his window with a telescope. The threat, which had never been grasped, had gone. Uncle Ralph went down to the Racket Court, trudging through the thick mud that grew in the windless, rainy days which often bound Aunt Zita and Aunt Thelma together, to look at his monoplane and envisage himself in battle against the Germans. Later, when the hole had almost healed over and a bonfire had been lit on the hill above the Hen Pond to celebrate victory, Uncle Ralph patched the flimsy wings of the plane on to its body and flew up the valley to the lake, at no greater height than the tops of the stooping fir trees. He had to circle the lake twice before he could rise to the extent of the ravine, and, once there, he flew over the shadow of the crater a hundred times, like an old bird searching for dropped prey. When Uncle Ralph came back from these expeditions, Maurice would appear breathless in school, for he had run, hardly slower than Uncle Ralph's plane, the whole length of the valley to the lake, to watch the reconnoitring.

Aunt Thelma brought a different life to the people of the village. After the victory bonfire, which was in the bright summer and therefore free from the intervention of Aunt Zita, the houses in the village began to change, and Aunt Thelma stayed often with my mother then. The occasional ghostly return of my father's and Aunt Zita's family had a disastrous effect on the villagers, and ruined the new spirit which Aunt Thelma was hoping to instil in the farm. When my father's mother in her soft, long, simple dresses
wandered along The Street, smiling and nodding her head to the neat old-fashioned gardens, the sweet william and lupins, glancing at the dark windows of uneven glass where she could see only herself reflected, but where the inmates saw her inquisitive eye as wide as the sky – there was a return to the old ways of keeping the houses, without indoor sanitation or the new lino, and wallpapers as smart and polite as polished veneer. Aunt Thelma went up to The Street to banish the old habits of the route my father's mother would take when she wanted to walk to the Hen Pond. Sometimes Aunt Thelma flouted my father's elder brother as he wandered bewildered at the reconstruction of the labourers' cottages. His friends stood with him in their straw hats with blue ribbons. They stood about in the farm and lounged on the hay bales. Slipping on the cow dung in the sloping field above The Street, they laughed at the utility fittings and bright nylons that were being taken into the renovated homes. Aunt Thelma shooed them away, and they went jesting and nudging down the mossy steps to the farm steading, where they disappeared at the muddy crossroads by the byre. If Aunt Zita was there it was hard to get rid of them – and in those times when there was talk of land belonging to everybody, and the valley no more under the long entails of my father's grandfather, my father was as much responsible for the restoration of his family as she was. My mother, torn between loyalty to her husband and belief in Aunt Thelma's measures, kept well away from The Street. In Peg's shop she stared absently at the new orange wallpaper and shiny brown paint, and made no reference to the bathroom, the first the cottage post office had seen, that had been wedged in next to the tiny sitting-room on the ground floor. Peg, however, soon lost her air of modernity. The cats settled on the chocolate-bar boxes, and the dust that came down again on the new lino went as before into the pale bars of the electric fire, giving off a smell of singeing hair.