The Bad Sister (40 page)

When the last day of October came, and if my mother and father were away, I would still be at Willie and Minnie's for the night when the stone men hurled the winds down from the ravines, without any need for my father to summon them, and the bonfire raised the spirits of the working dead. On that night, the road from the Kennels up to the hall was so dark and wet that the schoolhouse was invisible, and the Racket Court beyond was the only faint shimmer. The fire that was unlike Aunt Zita's, the common, raging fire up by the hall, where the path from the gardens of the big house ran in a silken loop into the muddy road from the byre, lit the poaching dead as they helped themselves to the finery of the past. Then there was blackness. Egg-shaped stones came up out of the sockets in the road and hit the soles of the feet. Minnie picked her way, in galoshes over court shoes.

The roads and paths of the valley moved together and apart again, on the night of this festival of return and re-animation. Our path, which was characterless now, neither fringed with the long grass that made a moving train of it, through the pampas land at the back of the house, nor white and cropped with winter, grew wider and sweet-smelling, and mist came down over it in a fringe. It came to fetch whoever would take it, by joining the back road before the hall came in sight. Closed in a vaporous tunnel, it snaked up past The Street and out on to open hill by the Hen Pond. There, it wavered suddenly. The grass was scratched and bare, the arms of the fog folded back to show the cottage where Maurice lived with his mother, and it lost direction under foreign stars. But it soon picked up again.
The stone men were beginning to tramp the hills, and the sky was getting hard and bright. The water which had lain heavy poured out of the valley, like water going out from the Hen Pond sluice. It left heather springing in the new sharpness, and washerwoman's wrinkles in the valley bottoms where bulges of water still lay in the grass. The new path went thinly up through burnt heather roots to the source of the power of the valley. It climbed almost as far as the seven cairns.

Willie and Joe and Minnie stayed on the road up to the hall. I went to find Maurice. His mother lived alone in the cottage near the Hen Pond. A soldier found her in the town when she was a young girl working at the mill, and ever since she had been alone with a child at the Hen Pond cottage, and I never thought to look deeper than that. She had a pinched, sour face, and had to be forcibly taken down to the bonfire party, for she would rather have missed the fun. But there was respect for her in The Street. Her burden was understood. And she walked down The Street with heavy bundles, more often than not the washing she did for the oldest woman there, or a batch of baking for a friend, as if to emphasize her pinioned situation. She was the only woman in the village without a husband. Maurice's wild ways drew her mouth in even further at the corners, and on the night of the rising dead she looked as if she wished she could fly away with them, in a trail of rebellious fire against the sky.

When Maurice and I left his house, with his mother walking reluctantly behind and carrying a great black leather holdall, we followed the path to the gap in the wall and went down by way of The Street. Maurice's mother wanted to visit the woman of ninety, who was older than my father's mother would have been, and to call in on some of the other houses, to satisfy herself she was going to the party on the right day, and at the right time. The old woman, who had seen so much, sometimes told Maurice's mother of the worst Hallowe'en night, when there had been a scandal from the big house. If Maurice had been forced to go with
his mother, he would listen to the scandal, and then there would be some version of it down by the chicken-house. But I preferred our own games to the ghosts in the brain of the old woman of ninety. We shivered with impatience in The Street, as his mother made her calls. There was light coming up from the square windows of the hall and the starting and stopping of an accordion. It even seemed the bonfire was about to be lit. We had to wait until Maurice's mother was ready, for if we left her alone she would go back to the Hen Pond cottage, and we would be punished for it.

The scene of the scandal was quite often enacted in the big house at that time of year, if my mother and father were there and Aunt Zita still lingered, sulking in the waterlogged days. It came to firm colour in the sitting-room, though shadows went sometimes to the front hall and even as far as the doorstep. It seemed that its shocking quality propelled it to leave the house and seek exposure: the shadows were grey and grainy, like lumps of newsprint. Even indoors, the colours of the scandal told by the old woman of ninety to Maurice's mother were sensational and vulgar. A comic-book air filled the sitting-room, and the sofas and chairs, respectfully clothed in the tentacular flowers of Utopian socialism, were subjected to a crude overlay. There were aspects to the scandal, though, which the old woman couldn't have known. It contained an element of retribution. When the picture faded, it always went with the crashing of the stone men in the hills. A lurid, thunderous light crept into the house and we knew the green days were over. As the wind began to strip the trees outside, and the family scandal merged once more with the pure noses of pre-Raphaelite beauties, Aunt Zita would laugh at the annual rendering of her mother and brother's shame.

The old woman in the village had had a brother too, about the same age as Uncle Wilhelmina, and her brother was a half-wit. His thick lips were pulled back to the gum, and were ridged like the underside of a slug. Twisted words
foamed from them. His eyes had been cut all wrong, so the pupils were rarely visible, and only the lichee whites looked out at the world. The old woman of ninety had cared for him, but he had died fairly young, age and time having formed a secret palimpsest in his body. By the time he was in his twenties, his head was reptilian, and his legs and feet still had the bumbling helplessness of a baby. In The Street and down by the byres he was seen only subliminally. He could have been the swish of a cow's tail, or the knowledge that a flock of pigeons had landed on the granary roof. He was never laughed at, at least by the people he lived among.

When my father's mother imitated the half-wit, there was a ripple of excited laughter from the sisters and sisters-in-law and some of the lady guests who had come in their chiffons to dinner from houses outside the valley. The men guffawed, as if there were something sexual and forbidden in aping the half-wit. And as she went on, my father's mother, freed for once on this eve of the rising of the village dead, shed her careful spirituality. She became pure vaudeville. The bright, glaring colours that always returned when the scene was enacted, might have been arc-lights on her unspeakable act: Parma violet, red, and a yellow so strong it hurt the eyes. My mother always turned aside in disgust, she hated this garish play. But all the others laughed, in their titillation, as my father's mother blubbered at the lips, and dragged her elegant feet in such a way that they looked heavy and clumsy. And she broke into song, in a dialect that was just comprehensible.

Uncle Wilhelmina had left the room at the beginning of the show. No one had noticed, and even when the scene came back again and again in its scudding colours, it was impossible to detect the moment he slipped away. He went first to his room and made his face as white as a porcelain doll. He drew black spokes round the hubs of his eyes. He purpled his lips from a pot stolen from his mother's table. He looked as if he had drowned in cold water.

By the time laughter was rising in the sitting room, and the butler was shooed away as he tried to announce dinner
to a family and guests exalted by the public placing of their fears and confusions on the village idiot, Uncle Wilhelmina was out of the house and in the dark garden that was just beginning to be stirred by the wind. His white face, and long fair hair tied in a black ribbon, were all that was visible of him as he went up the garden. He paused by the weeping ash, and picked a switch. In the yew trees the village dead were collecting, and their faces looked out from amongst the fleshy yew-berries. Uncle Wilhelmina walked to the top of the garden, and let himself out of the gate by the hall. Mottled ivy pulled at his throat.

In the dining-room, the party had at last assembled. Rich food was handed round. When the constables from the town came in – it was then that the wind moaned more sharply in the chimney, and the picture began to fade, and the crackle of the coming winter put out the lethargy of the uncertain days. My father's mother's face went into an exquisite blur as the scandal was exposed.

Uncle Wilhelmina had wandered along The Street, soliciting. He held the ash stick in his hand and asked to be beaten. One of the cowmen, a man of indignation who was only a short time in the valley, ran all the way to the town to report the scene. And Uncle Wilhelmina was smuggled down to the house and up to his room, for charges were not in the end brought. He lay exhausted on his bed, with his blue eyes rolling in the white paste surround. The old woman of ninety certainly remembered seeing him out there, but she couldn't know of the travesty of her idiot brother in the big house, which came before Uncle Wilhelmina's arrest, and the unforgiving century of his mother's shame.

In the village hall, at the times when my father and mother and Aunt Zita were away, the people stood in clusters uneasily at first, for they were used to greater distances. Toffee apples hung from the rafters. The children butted them, raising bruises on the wrinkled heads. By the fire stood the accordion men, already scarlet in the face from
the heat. When my family was there, our table was placed up near them, next to the fire, at the head of the hall looking down. A white cloth hung from its sides: the people from the village stretched out in a straight line from it, and at those times Jimmy didn't go up to Willie and say:

‘Can I have the key, then?'

Willie handed over the key to the garage by the big house as if it had been my father who had asked for it. He knew, in the times of their absence, that Jimmy would reverse out the car over the fallen leaves on the chequered courtyard, that the leaves would rise again in the last swirl of wind before the end of the night and blow into the rooms and corridors of the big house, and that with the car at large we could all be in danger. Yet he handed over the key, in this ritual of Hallowe'en.

The car in the courtyard garage was a red car, built in 1914, and no one, not even Uncle Ralph, was allowed to drive it. My father's father had bought it in Austria as a collector's piece. It was the car in which the Grand Duke had been shot, in Sarajevo; and it was said to have killed over twenty people since. Each subsequent owner had crashed and died in it after only a few months. It had even pretended to break down once: its owner had arranged to be towed to the nearest town, and as they set off the engine sprang to power. It rushed into the towing vehicle in front, and crushed the impotent driver to death on the steering wheel. My father's father had been proud of this acquisition. It was shipped to England, as there wasn't a soul in Europe who would drive it by then for love or money. Uncle Ralph often stood for hours in the gloom of the garage and gazed at it longingly. He would willingly have sacrificed his life for the experience. But he was forbidden. After these feasts of contemplation, he went up to the gunroom over the garage and wandered about in the remains of my father's father's uninteresting museum. The adders pickled in bottles, and the black bear with an unconvincing red tongue, did nothing to distract Uncle Ralph from thoughts of the death car below.

Jimmy was the only man in the village wild enough to handle the car. With the big house empty, and Peg more and more apprehensive behind her weak barricades of cardboard boxes, he roamed the village at night. The inhabitants of The Street bolted their doors. Jimmy's manic phase was right ahead, with the first blast of winter wind from the hills, and he needed the red car. As the accordion band struck up, and we began to dance, we could hear it roar up the hill, turn with a demoniacal shriek at the crossroads by the byre, and go off up the valley in a stream of pure, murderous noise.

Then the battle really started. The stone men, arming themselves to conquer the valley while the house was undefended, found themselves charged, on the wide moorland, by the instrument of the greatest destruction of the century. Jimmy swerved between the cairns as if they were lamp-posts. The car, which had started the First World War, and so had sent my father's elder brother to his death, imprisoning my father in the valley and my mother with Aunt Zita, set out to destroy these early barons of the hills. Then it would have erased everything in its path. It carried the blood of thousands of years of plundered civilizations in its shining red paintwork. And Jimmy loved to be at the wheel of the car at the moment of its greatest confrontation, with men who had already been murdered, who were pure stone, and who knew nothing of the fine art and delicate spirit of the centuries it had already massacred.

In the hall, we danced and raised the spirits waiting to come in. Willie and Minnie danced together, with distant, concentrated expressions on their faces. I danced with Joe. He pressed me to the soft pillow of his stomach in a cashmere V-neck under the blue suit. We birled, and the hall grew hotter, and the swinging toffee apples came down in puddles of melted sugar on the floor. Even Maurice's mother danced, and it was always with a woman from The Street, for this was the one night she could put her hand on the women, other men's wives, with whom she baked and knitted and talked, in an incessant stream, to the white
smoke that rose from the kettle. Peg didn't dance, but she stood by the table where the refreshments were laid out, and she watched over the bottles of cola that had come from her shop, and the plates of bridge rolls. The souls of the nameless, field-labouring dead flickered in the candle eyes of the turnips on the wall.