The Bad Sister (39 page)

Willie, Minnie and Joe paid no attention at all. They were sitting, and a heap of ladies' cashmeres was at their feet. There was a coral colour, and a Madonna blue, and a bright sea-green. Willie was smoking his pipe and tapping the bowl. The clock ticked loudly when he did this, and it put the three of them into a greater silence. Joe picked up each garment with care and handed it to Minnie for the choice. Although the town was small, and set down like a grid-iron in the one flat stretch between the hills, it was quite clear that Joe came from there and not from our valley. He always had a faint fever of the town on him, a hectic glaze. In the rowing-boat on the lake, his blue suit shone brightly. There was something venal in his plump fingers, in his cloth-soft tobacco pouch, and in his aftershave that smelt of the raspberry spirit Aunt Zita drank before setting off in her night-fire. I knew he went to the Saturday dances in the hotel just outside the town. The constant proximity of others made him quick and deft. Even when he sat in the boat on the lake, and the wind tugged his white hair and stood it up in soldiers before letting it fall again, Joe's eyes were always shifting. But to be with Willie was to see the blank gaze of a hawk.

It was almost dark by the time Joe and I were up the mud road to the lake, and that was because my dog had broken into the sitting room and caused consternation. She had grown tired of waiting on the slope of grass that separated Willie's back door from the Kennels. The black dogs bayed at her, so she jumped in through the scullery window, and then they were silent, as if the incredible audacity of what they had seen had taken away their barking for ever. She ran from the scullery with her muddy paws. Minnie shrank back, and Joe went quickly for the cashmeres, and no harm
was done, but my dog had to be put outside again before we could leave the house, to ward off bad luck. So Willie fed the black dogs, and after a while Joe and I went and stood with him as he stirred the oats, and Minnie swept where my dog had been, a kneeling prayer to the god who watched over her home. As I followed Joe up the short drive from the Kennels and on to the road, I saw her in the upstairs bedroom she had shared with Willie for thirty years. The light was on behind her, and she held a feather duster as if she were conducting an orchestra of inaudible music. Then she turned, and waved the tips of the feathers on the photos on the chest-of-drawers. They tickled the dustless photos of herself and Willie. At the secret signal that her silent music had stopped, and she was working ordinarily again, the black dogs burst into a barking that reached halfway up the valley, and came back in an angry shouting from the hills.

When my dog ran into Willie and Minnie's house, she ran in as if she was at home there. She didn't rush in circles, as she did in the big house, nor did she stop suddenly at the flicker of the dead, the edge of light which only she could see. She came into the unending present where Willie and Minnie lived; and it seemed without barriers until Minnie threw her out. Willie and Minnie were allowed no ghosts. The house wasn't even theirs. The keepers who had lived there before them might have been their ancestors, but it was of no importance. They had only their own youth to haunt them. In the photos, which were every day protected from the silt of the unchanging days, Willie was upright and his eyes were soft, as if he were looking at something that had just been offered him. Minnie's chin was pointed, and her face smiled from eyes to mouth. Now Willie's brows wriggled in his head and his cheeks had half fallen, the buried half coming up white under the jowls. His eyes could see only vermin and wide skies. And a web of wrinkles had caught Minnie's smiles. The real existence of the couple was more frail than the life in the corridors and rooms of the big house, where my father's Aunt Louisa, and his elder brother, and his mother who sat sewing when Aunt Zita
came, had their names in porcelain by the bells that rang at their command in the basement. Their descent was in red and gold books in the library. In the directory, attached by a string to the telephone table under the bells, there was no name given for Willie and Minnie. There was a list of Keepers' Cottages, and the Kennels came fourth. A number; but anyone could have answered it.

When Joe and I, and my dog, had got up the valley, and opened the boathouse, and pushed the boat out on the water, Joe sat down heavily in the stern and opened his fishing satchel. He took out a fly and held it between the cushions of fat on his fingers. ‘Yes, Willie tells me he's to get in moleskins for a coat,' he said. And, ‘So you'll be making your turnips for the party soon. Getting quite excited, are you?'

The boat drifted out to the main channel of the loch and paused, while the conflicting eddyings under the prow slapped against the wood and rocked us into stillness. The absolute emptiness of the valley since my father and my mother and Aunt Zita, and all her band of grotesque night companions, had left, crept over the water and reached the tops of the hills. The larches rattled noisily: the wind had got to them but it wasn't with us yet. My dog ran on the sides of the ravines, and small stones dropped like sand in an hourglass.

I had seen the bodies of moles strung out on fences on the way up the valley. Their small, skinned corpses appeared once the big house was out of sight. They hung nose down, as if trying to get their snouts in the earth again, and throw up fresh tumuli. I knew the velvety grey fur would be stitched into squares for a coat for Aunt Zita. She would walk in the woods in it when the leaves were falling, and my mother would be deceived again, taking her for the grey of a silver birch tree, or an aspen. The moles would rot there, until they were no more than strips of tortured black leather. Willie might unstring them, if the smell attracted too much vermin for his traps.

In the village, as we went, the emptiness of the big house was spreading upward from the dale which embraced it, to the byres, and the square village building where the Hallowe'en party was held, and further, up the steps to The Street. Joe walked through the emptiness in his blue suit. A light was on at Peg's window, but she wasn't there. A pile of sweet cartons stood up against the curtain. From the house next door the cowman Jimmy came out and headed up the road to the byre where he worked. Peg had never liked him, because he was a leering man. He had lost his wife, and he lived with his daughter, who was thin and white-faced. Yet Peg was bound to him in a Siamese relation of stone and brick. She could hear his step at night, and knew his cup of tea when he swilled it down and gasped. He seized the women in the village by the waist. Only the counter in the little post office stopped him handling Peg, and that was when he came in the front, to buy stamps or cola or a pad of Basildon Bond. Peg was afraid of her back step, adjacent to his and without the dividing line of officialdom. There, Jimmy would demand a packet of Weights after hours, and there was no sound of money in his pocket. She would turn him away, and he walked to the end of his path, to look bad-temperedly over the stone bridge to the ferns and nettles of the abandoned kitchen garden. When the big house was empty, and the emptiness had begun to rise as far as The Street and the cottage near the Hen Pond where Maurice lived with his mother, he was a terror in the village.

The absence of the strolling owners of the big house made the dogs and the children run wild in the village. Maurice was up half the night in the granary by the village hall, chasing rats with a shovel and bringing it down on their heads when they ran into corners. The other children raced with him. Even Peg's cats walked up the road to the hall and back, with their ginger tails sticking up behind. There was a clustering, from time to time, by the stained wooden notice board outside the hall. But it announced only a meeting of some kind, which had taken place in the summer.

The board presented a piece of history as the future. And in a time when people wanted news. For, in the unchan-gingness of the days, the absence from below in the big house made the evenings longer than usual, and the Hallowe'en party a flame that might seize the whole valley. If Aunt Zita was there, and the jostling of the north wind, they built the bonfire outside the hall with a special haste. They went right up the valley for wood. They made a toppling swan's nest, which on the night would let out an egg of fire. For all the authenticity of the victim, with Minnie's knitted hat on, and a thick body of crackling hay, and legs pressed in Peg's old lisle stockings, it was Aunt Zita they were going to burn. It was possible to see, in the unlit twigs, the outline of her shrivelled neck and arms.

From the hall, I led the way into the valley shortcut which lay through the garden of the big house. Joe followed like a trespasser. If he had seen Willie there, coming up the path with the black dogs at heel, they would hardly have exchanged a greeting. In the near vicinity of the big house, the absence was oppressive. The green air, still untroubled by wind, hung around the long windows. From inside the house, set off perhaps by tripping, scattering feet, came a sound like wires being plucked, of the resonance of rooms in the emptiness. The house stood unnoticed on its carpet of turf, yet it gave out, from time to time, a groan from the chords inside.

On the loch, Joe caught a small trout. The dark, which had held off, made the fish invisible. He moved to the rower's seat; and the ends of the oars, which could no longer be seen, made an awkward pat on the water. The wind moved out of the larches at last. Joe wobbled as the boat rocked, and he strained for the open boathouse door. Up in the hills the German airman, the buried enemy, and the long rows of stone men took possession of the land. They brought thunder down with the wind, and the wild-cherry tree at the edge of the water shone out in a flash of blue. The airman was enormous, his shoulders took the weight of the rain-heavy sky. Clods of earth fell from his
nostrils into the ravines. And the mountains rang with the din of the stone men as they marched.

Under the floor of water in the boathouse, the weeds were as black as the drowned feathers in Aunt Zita's hats. Joe and I walked back along the valley, past the naked moles, and the great house stifled in its silence like a piano under a cloth. In the village, the bonfire had been half built, and forked twigs that had the brittleness of Peg's elbow stuck out at the side of it. Joe stopped at Peg's back door, to buy cigarettes. She came very slowly to the door, and the sweet orange smell, of spilt Kia-Ora, and the cats sleeping with their marmalade backs down, white stomachs uppermost in the shoe box, came out into the night. At this time, when my father and mother were away and everything was in abeyance, the wild nights that started in the mountains above the loch never came down as far as the village. They stormed, and then fell quiet again, and the wind did little more than ripple the surface of the bowl. So Peg had beads of water on her face, from the humidity, and the rushing sound, at her back door, of the burn under the bridge to the old garden, was as near as if it had been flowing through the middle of her shop.

Down the road, Minnie waited with tea and scones. The dogs, guessing my dog's arrival, sent a shivering howl. It went up past us, on a straight trail that held Willie and Minnie's souls too, to a change in the days, the jolt of the year's wheel turning. On the day the dead rose, the villagers' dead, they would go to the big house and fly into my father's mother's room. If the big house was empty, they haunted the Racket Court and decked themselves out in Aunt Zita's rotted velvets, in the cretonnes that had gone on the coughing aunts to the Pyramids, in the seal-fur coat Uncle Ralph wore in his monoplane and threw away when it grinned at the seams. They became bats, and when the exquisite remnants they had plundered from the Racket Court began to turn to dust, they settled in piles of leaves on the top landing of the big house. This was why my mother liked to be away at this time, if she could rid herself
of Aunt Zita and if Aunt Thelma had not yet come. When the valley was in water, and after that, when the winds pulled at the nameless dead and set them dancing in the eyes of the turnips, she was afraid and weak. Even when there were people in the big house, the rising, forgotten dead could be seen jumping in the trees.

As we went down the last slope to the Kennels, the cowman Jimmy came up towards us. He was drunk, and flailing his arms. He must have walked five miles to the little town, to drink. Joe nodded to him. He stumbled on, and we arrived at Minnie's door. She was standing there in the coral cashmere she had picked. I hoped Jimmy wouldn't wander, in his drunkenness, into the grounds of the big house. He might circle there, among the changing gardens, and the ghosts of his own forebears gathered on the stone griffins and battlements. Or he might frighten himself, bumping into Uncle Ralph. Then, in his crazed state, Jimmy would do anything. The village, and Peg, would hardly be safe from him on the night of the labourers' dead.

Uncle Ralph, left alone in the big house, would often experiment with his own life at these times. When there wasn't a breath of wind outside, he would jump from his high window in a new flying-machine, and the thin wooden wings would carry him as far as the side of the hill opposite. He would lie panting for a while, in the silken cocoon he had constructed for his body. After, he would sit in a barrel of hot wax for nine nights and days, taking only figs to eat, so that when my mother and father returned his body was as soft and white as a caterpillar's, and he was ready, in his strange reversed vision of the world, to go into his winter chrysalis. Often, the experiments brought only the satisfaction of a mild danger to life. In the early morning, before the red postman's van came up the drive, Uncle Ralph stationed himself at the bottom of the cattle-grid, where last year's leaves, and sometimes a hedgehog, were imprisoned under two barred tracks. Uncle Ralph had the need to know what it was like to have a car going over him. He
crouched in the compost and waited for his sky to become thick with wires. When the underbelly of the van had passed, and clouds of exhaust still lingered overhead, he climbed out and walked stiffly back to the house. The van, on its return trip from depositing letters for my father, had to swerve to avoid Uncle Ralph, in his suit of autumn leaves.