Aunt Maria Read online

  Then at nearly ten-fifteen, when Mum was taking the potted plants out of the bath in order to make Chris get into it for what Chris calls washing and I call wallowing in his own mud, someone hammered at the back door. Chris opened it as Mum and I came running. A lady stood there beaming a great torch at us. She was Mum’s age—or maybe younger: you know how hard it is to tell—and she had a crisp, clean, nunlike look.

  “You must be Betty Laker,” she said to Mum. “I’m Elaine. From next door,” she added, when she saw that meant nothing. And she marched past Chris and me without noticing us. “I brought this torch,” she explained, “because I thought you would have turned the electricity off by now. She insists on it. She worries about fires in the night.”

  “Chris,” said Mum. “Find out where the switch is.”

  “It’s behind the door here,” said Elaine. “Turn it off when I’ve gone. I’ll only stay a moment to make sure you know what needs doing. We’re all so glad you could come and look after her. Any problems up to now?”

  “No,” said Mum, looking a bit dazed.

  Elaine strolled past us into the dining room where she sauntered here and there, swinging the big torch and looking at Mum’s knitting and my notebooks and Chris’s homework piled on various chairs. She was wearing a crisply belted black mackintosh raincoat and she was very thin. I wondered if she was a policewoman. “She likes the place tidier than this,” Elaine said.

  “We’re in the middle of unpacking,” Mum said humbly. Chris looked daggers. He hates Mum crawling to people.

  Elaine gave Mum a smile. It put two matching creases on either side of her mouth, but it was not what I would call a real smile. Funny, because she was quite pretty, really. “You’ve gathered that she needs dressing, undressing, washing, and her cooking done,” she said. “The three of you can probably bathe her, can’t you? Good. And when you want to take her for some air, I’ll bring the wheelchair round. It lives at my house because there’s more room. And do be careful she doesn’t fall over. I expect you’ll manage. We’ll all be dropping in to see how you’re getting on, anyway. So…” She looked round again. “I’ll love you and leave you,” she said. She shot Chris, for some reason, another of her strange smiles and marched off again, calling over her shoulder, “Don’t forget the electricity.”

  “She gives her orders!” Chris said. “Mum, did you know what we were in for? If you didn’t, we’ve been got on false pretenses.”

  “I know, but Aunt Maria does need help,” Mum said helplessly. “Where’s that electricity switch? And are there any candles?”

  There were two candles. Mum added candles to her list before she got into bed just now. Now she’s sitting there saying, “These sheets aren’t very clean. I must wash them tomorrow. She’s not got a washing machine but there must be a launderette somewhere in the place.” Then she went on to, “Mig, you’ve written reams. Stop and come to bed now or there won’t be any of that notebook left.” She was beginning on “There won’t be any of that candle left, either—” when Chris came storming in wearing just his pants.

  He said, “I don’t know what this is. It was under my pillow.” He threw something stormily on the floor and went away again.

  It is pink and frilly and called St. Margaret. We think it is probably Lavinia’s nightdress. Mum has spent the last quarter of an hour marveling about it. “She must have been called away in a hurry, after all,” she said, preparing to have more agonies of guilt. “She’d already moved down to the little room to make room for us. Oh, I feel awful!”

  “Mum,” I said, “if you can feel awful looking at someone’s old nightie, what are you going to feel if you happen to see Chris’s socks?” That made her laugh. She’s forgotten to feel guilty now and she’s threatening to blow out the candle.

  Two

  There is a ghost in Chris’s room.

  I wrote that two days ago. Since then events have moved so fast that snails are whizzing by, blurred with speed. I am paralyzed with boredom, Mum has knitted three sleeves for one sweater for the same reason, and Chris is behaving worse and worse. So is Aunt Maria. We all hate Elaine and the other Mrs. Urs.

  How can Aunt Maria bear living in Cranbury with no television? The days have all gone the same way, starting with Mum leaping out of bed and waking me up in her hurry to get breakfast as soon as Aunt Maria begins thumping her stick on the floor. While I’m getting up, Aunt Maria is sounding off next door. “No, no, dear. It’s quite fun to eat runny egg for a change—I usually tell Lavinia to do them for five and a half minutes, but it doesn’t matter a bit.” That was the last two days. Today Mum must have got the egg right, because Aunt Maria was on about how interesting to eat flabby toast, dear. The noise wakes Chris up and he comes forth like the skeleton in the cupboard. Snarl, snarl!

  Chris is not usually like this. The first morning, I asked him what was the matter and he said, “Oh, nothing. There’s a ghost in my room.” The second morning he wouldn’t speak. Today I didn’t speak, either.

  Mum has just time to drink a cup of coffee before Aunt Maria is thumping her stick again, for us to get her up. We have to hook her into a corset thing which is like shiny pink armor, and you should just see her knickers. Chris did. He said they would make good trousers for an Arabian dancing girl, provided the girl was six feet tall and highly respectable. I thought of Aunt Maria with a jewel in her tummy button and was nearly sick laughing. Aunt Maria made me worse by saying, “I have a great sense of humor, dears. Tell me the joke.” That was while Chris and I were helping her downstairs. She was in full regalia by then, in a tweed suit and two necklaces, and Mum was trying to make Aunt Maria’s bed the way Lavinia is supposed-to-do-it-but-it-doesn’t-matter-dear.

  She comes and sits in state in the living room then. It is somehow the darkest room in the house, though sun streams in from the brown garden. One of us has to sit there with her. We found that out the first day when we were all getting ready to go shopping for the things on Mum’s huge list. Chris was saying sarcastically that he couldn’t wait to see some of the hot spots in town, when Aunt Maria caught up with what we were talking about.

  She said, in her special urgent scandalized way, “You’re not going out!”

  “Yes,” said Chris. “We are on holiday, you know.”

  ” Mum shut him up by saying, “Christian!” and explained about the shopping.

  “But suppose I fall!” said Aunt Maria. “Suppose someone calls. How shall I answer the door?”

  “You opened the door to us when we came,” I said.

  Aunt Maria promptly went all gentle and martyred and said none of us knew what it was like to be old, and did we realize she sometimes never saw a soul for a whole month on end? “You go, dears. Get your fresh air,” she said.

  Naturally Mum got guilty at that, and, just as naturally, it was me that had to stay behind. I spent the next three hundred hours sitting in a little brown chair facing Aunt Maria. She sits on a yellow brocade sofa with knobs on and silk ropes hooked around the knobs to stop the sofa’s arms falling down. Her feet are plonked on the wine-colored carpet and her hands are plonked on her sticks. Aunt Maria is a heavy sort of lady. I keep thinking of her as huge and I keep being surprised to find that she is nothing like as tall as Chris, and not even as tall as Mum. I think she may only be as tall as me. But her character is enormous—right up to the ceiling.

  She talks. It is all about her friends in Cranbury. “Corinne West and Adele Taylor told Zoe Green—Zoe Green has a brilliant mind, dear: she’s read every book in the library—and Zoe Green told Hester Bailey—Hester paints charming watercolors, all real scenes, everyone says she’s as good as van Gogh—and Hester said I was quite right to be hurt at what Miss Phelps had been saying. After all I’d done for Miss Phelps! I used to send Lavinia over to her, but I wonder if I should anymore. We told Benita Wallins, and she said on no account. Selma Tidmarsh had told her all Miss Phelps had said. Selma and Phyllis—Phyllis Forbes, that is, not Phyllis West—wanted to go
round and speak to Miss Phelps, but I said ‘No, I shall turn the other cheek.’ So Phyllis West went to Ann Haversham and said…”

  On and on. You end up feeling you are in a sort of bubble filled with that getting-a-cold smell, and inside that bubble is Cranbury and Aunt Maria, and that is the entire world. It is hard to remember there is any land outside Cranbury. I got into a kind of daze of boredom. It was humming in my ears. When you get that way, the most ordinary things get violently exciting. I know when I looked round and saw a cat on the living room windowsill, it was like Christmas or my birthday or when Chris’s friend Andy notices me. Wonderful! And it was one of those gray, fluffy cats with a flat, silly face that are normally utterly boring. It was staring intensely in at us through the glass, opening its mouth and dribbling down its gray ruff, and I stared back into its flat yellow eyes—they were slightly crossed—as if that cat was my favorite friend in all the world.

  “You’re not attending, dear,” said Aunt Maria, and she turned to see what I was staring at. Her face went red. She levered herself up on one stick and stumped toward the window, slashing the air with her other stick. “Get off! How dare you sit on my windowsill!” The cat glared in stupid horror and fled for its life. Aunt Maria sat back down, puffing. “He comes in my garden all the time,” she said. “After birds. As I was saying, Ann Haversham and Rosa Brisling were great friends until Miss Phelps said that. Now you mustn’t think I’m annoyed with Amaryllis Phelps, but I was hurt—”

  I thought she was horrid to that cat. I couldn’t listen to her after that. I sat and wondered about Chris’s ghost. It could have been a joke. But if it wasn’t—I didn’t know whether I wanted it to be Dad’s ghost trying to tell Chris where his body was, or not. The idea made my teeth want to chatter, and I had a sort of ache of fear and excitement.

  “Do attend, dear,” said Aunt Maria. “This is interesting.”

  “I am,” I said. She had been talking about Elaine-next-door. I had sort of heard. “We met Elaine,” I said. “She came in last night with a torch.”

  “You mustn’t call her Elaine, dear,” Aunt Maria said. “She’s Mrs. Blackwell.”

  “Why not?” I said. “She said Elaine.”

  “That’s because I always call her that,” Aunt Maria said. “But if you do, it’s rude.”

  So I’m calling her Elaine. Elaine came marching in again, in her black mac but without her torch, at the same time as Chris and Mum. I’d heard Chris’s voice and then Mum’s and I jumped up, feeling I was being let out of prison. Something was actually happening! Then the living room door opened and it was Elaine. “Don’t go, dear,” Aunt Maria said to me. “I want you here to be introduced.”

  I had to stand there, while Elaine took no notice of me, as before. She went to Aunt Maria and kissed her cheek. “They’ve done your shopping,” she said, “and I told them where to put things. Is there anything else you want me to tell them?”

  “They’re being very good,” Aunt Maria said. She had gone all merry. “They’re trying quite hard. I don’t expect them to get anything right straight away.”

  “I see,” said Elaine. “I’ll go and tell them to make an effort then.” She was not joking. She was like a police chief taking her orders from the Great Dictator.

  “Before you do,” Aunt Maria said merrily, “I want you to meet my new little Naomi. Such a dear little great-niece!”

  Elaine turned her face toward me. “Mig,” I said. “I prefer being called Mig.”

  “Hello, Naomi,” said Elaine, and she strode out of the room again. When I went after her, I found her standing over Mum and Chris and scads of grocery bags, saying, “And you really must make sure she is never left alone.”

  Mum, looking very flustered, said, “We left Mig here.”

  “I know,” Elaine said grimly, meaning that was what she was complaining of. Then she turned to Chris. Her mouth made the stretch with two creases at the ends. “You,” she said. “You have the look of a gallant young man. I’m sure you’ll keep your aunt company in future, won’t you?”

  We think it was meant to be flirtatious. We stared at one another as the back door shut crisply behind Elaine. “Well!” Mum said. “You seem to have made a hit, Chris! And talking of hits, hit her I shall if she gives me one more order. Who does she think she is?”

  “Aunt Maria’s chief of police,” I said.

  “Right!” said Mum.

  Then we unpacked all the loads of provisions, and guess what? We found a deep freeze in the cupboard beside the sink, absolutely stuffed with food. There was ice cream and bread and hot dogs and raspberries in it. Half the stuff Mum had bought was things that were there already. Chris sorted through it with great zeal. Mum is always amazed at how much he eats and keeps saying, “You can’t still be hungry!” I have tried to explain, from my own experience. It’s a sort of nagging need you have, even when you feel full. It’s not starving, just that you keep wanting more to eat.

  “Yes,” says Mum. “That’s what I mean. How can you find room? Oh, dear. We wronged poor Lavinia again. She left Aunt Maria very well supplied, after all.”

  Chris taxed Aunt Maria with this over lunch. Aunt Maria said loftily, “I never pry into the kitchen, dear. But frozen food is very bad for you.” And before Chris could point out that Aunt Maria was at that moment eating frozen peas, Aunt Maria rounded on Mum. “I was so ashamed, dear, when Elaine came in. The thought of her seeing you and Naomi in that state. And you went out like that, dear.”

  “What state? Out like what?” we all said.

  Aunt Maria lowered her eyes. “In trousers!” she whispered, hushed and horrified. Mum and I stared from Mum’s jeans to mine and then at one another. “And Naomi’s hair so untidy,” Aunt Maria continued. “She must have forgotten to plait it today. But of course you’ll both change this afternoon, won’t you? In case any of my friends call.”

  “And what about me?” Chris asked sweetly. “Shall I wear a skirt, too?” Aunt Maria pretended not to hear, so he added, “In case any of your friends call?”

  “These peas are really delicious,” Aunt Maria said loudly to Mum. “I wouldn’t have thought peas were in season yet. Where did you find them?”

  “They’re frozen,” Chris said, even louder, but she pretended not to hear that, either.

  It is very hard to know how deaf Aunt Maria is. Sometimes she seems like a post, like then, and sometimes she can sit in the living room and hear what you whisper in the kitchen with both doors shut in between. Chris says the rule is she hears if you don’t want her to. Chris is thoroughly exasperated by that. He keeps trying to practice his guitar. In the little room halfway upstairs, with his door shut, Mum and I can hardly hear the guitar, but whenever Chris starts to play, Aunt Maria springs up, shrieking, “What’s that noise? There’s a burglar trying to break into the house!” I know how Chris feels, because Aunt Maria does that when I have my Walkman on, too. Even if I turn it so low hardly a whisper comes into the earphones, Aunt Maria shrieks, “What’s that noise? Is the tank in the loft leaking?”

  Mum has made us both stop. “It is her house, loves,” she said when we argued. “We’re only her guests.”

  “On a working holiday!” Chris snarled. Mum was cleaning Aunt Maria’s brass, because Aunt Maria said that this was Lavinia’s day for doing it, but she didn’t expect Mum to do it.

  On the same grounds, Mum changed into her good dress and made me wear a skirt. I pointed out I’ve only got one skirt with me—my pleated one—and Mum said, “Mig, I’ll buy you another. We are her guests.”

  “Oh good,” said Chris. “Is that a rule—visitors have to do what the owner of the house wants? Next time Andy comes round in London I’ll make him kiss Mig.”

  That made me hit Chris, and Aunt Maria shrieked that slates were falling off the roof. “See what I mean?” said Chris. “It is her house. Pieces fall off if you hit me. Wicked, destructive Mig, knocking nice Auntie’s house down.”

  I think he meant me to laugh, but Aunt
Maria was getting me down, too, so I didn’t. I stopped talking to Chris for a while. What with that, and being numbed with boredom, I didn’t manage to speak sensibly to Chris until two whole days later. It was silly. I kept wanting to ask him about his ghost, and I didn’t.

  In the afternoons, Aunt Maria’s friends all come. They are the ones she talks about all morning. I had expected them all to be old hags, but they are quite ordinary ladies, mostly in smart clothes and smart hairdos. Some of them are even nearly young, like Elaine. Corinne West and Adele Taylor, who came first, are Elaine-aged and stylish. Benita Wallins, who came with them, was more the sort I’d expected, stumping along with bandages under her stockings, in a hat and a shiny quilted coat. From the greedy interested looks she gave us, you could see she knew we’d be there and couldn’t wait to inspect us. They are all Mrs. Something and we are supposed to call them that. Chris calls them all Mrs. Ur and mixes their names up on purpose.

  Anyway, they came and Mum made them all mugs of coffee. Aunt Maria gave a merry laugh. “We’re camping out at the moment, Corinne, dear. Now this is Betty and Chris, and I want you all to meet my niece, my dear little Naomi.” She always says that, and it makes me want to be rude like Chris, only I can never think of things to say until after they’ve gone. I am a failure and a hypocrite, because I feel just as rude as Chris. But it just doesn’t come out.

  They must have gone straight next door when they left. Elaine marched in ten minutes later, using her two-line smile and uttering steely laughs. When Elaine laughs, it is like the biggest of Aunt Maria’s clocks striking—a running-down whir, followed by clanging. We think this means that Elaine is being social and diplomatic. She flings her hair back across the shoulders of her black mac and corners Mum. “You’ll have a lot of hurt feelings,” she said, “if you give any of the others coffee in mugs.”