Travels With My Aunt Read online

  ‘Then we will let it reach seven shillings,’ Aunt Augusta retorted. ‘Henry, I feel I ought perhaps to warn you before we go in that a white funeral in my case would have been quite out of place.’

  ‘But-you’ve-never-married,’ I said, very quickly to beat the hiccups.

  ‘I have nearly always, during the last sixty or more years, had a friend,’ Aunt Augusta said. She added, perhaps because I looked incredulous, ‘Age, Henry, may a little modify our emotions – it does not destroy them.’

  Even those words did not prepare me properly for what I found next. My life in the bank had taught me, of course, to be unsurprised, even by the demand for startling overdrafts, and I had always made it a point neither to ask for nor to listen to any explanation. The overdraft was given or refused simply on the previous credit of the client. If I seem to the reader a somewhat static character he should appreciate the long conditioning of my career before retirement. My aunt, I was to discover, had never been conditioned by anything at all, and she had no intention of explaining more than she had already done.

  3

  THE Crown and Anchor was built like a bank in Georgian style. Through the windows I could see men with exaggerated moustaches in tweed coats, which were split horsily behind, gathered round a girl in jodhpurs. They were not the type to whom I would have extended much credit, and I doubted whether any of them, except the girl, had ever ridden a horse. They were all drinking bitter, and I had the impression that any spare cash they might have put aside went on tailors and hairdressers rather than equitation. A long experience with clients has made me prefer a shabby whisky-drinker to a well-dressed beer-drinker.

  We went in by a side door. My aunt’s apartment was on the second floor, and on the first floor there was a small sofa which I learnt later had been bought by my aunt so that she could take a little rest on the way up. It was typical of her generous nature that she had bought a sofa, which could barely be squeezed on to the landing, and not a chair for one. ‘I always take a little rest at this point. Come and sit down, too, Henry. The stairs are steep, though perhaps they don’t seem so at your age.’ She looked at me critically. ‘You have certainly changed a lot since I saw you last, though you haven’t got much more hair.’

  ‘I’ve had it, but I’ve lost it,’ I explained.

  ‘I have kept mine. I can still sit upon it.’ She added surprisingly, ‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair. Not that I could have ever let it down from a second-floor flat.’

  ‘Aren’t you disturbed by the noise from the bar?’

  ‘Oh no. And the bar is very convenient if I suddenly run short. I just send Wordsworth down.’

  ‘Who is Wordsworth?’

  ‘I call him Wordsworth because I can’t bring myself to call him Zachary. All the eldest sons in his family have been called Zachary for generations – after Zachary Macaulay who did so much for them on Clapham Common. The surname was adopted from the bishop not the poet.’

  ‘He’s your valet?’

  ‘Let us say he attends to my wants. A very gentle sweet strong person. But don’t let him ask you for a CTC. He receives quite enough from me.’

  ‘What is a CTC?’

  ‘That is what they called any tip or gift in Sierra Leone when he was a boy during the war. The initials belonged to Cape to Cairo Cigarettes which all the sailors handed out generously.’

  My aunt’s conversation went too quickly for my understanding, so that I was not really prepared for the very large middle-aged negro wearing a striped butcher’s apron who opened the door when my aunt rang. ‘Why, Wordsworth,’ she said with a touch of coquetry, ‘you’ve been washing up breakfast without waiting for me.’ He stood there glaring at me, and I wondered whether he expected a CTC before he would let me pass.

  ‘This is my nephew, Wordsworth,’ my aunt said.

  ‘You be telling me whole truth, woman?’

  ‘Of course I am. Oh Wordsworth, Wordsworth!’ she added with tender banter.

  He let us in. The lights were on in the living-room, now that the day had darkened, and my eyes were dazzled for a moment by rays from the glass ornaments which flashed back from every open space. There were angels on the buffet wearing robes striped like peppermint rock; and in an alcove there was a Madonna with a gold face and a gold halo and a blue robe. On a sideboard on a gold stand stood a navy-blue goblet, large enough to hold at least four bottles of wine, with a gold trellis curled around the bowl on which pink roses grew and green ivy. There were mauve storks on the bookshelves and red swans and blue fish. Black girls in scarlet dresses held green candle sconces, and shining down on all this was a chandelier which might have been made out of sugar icing hung with pale blue, pink and yellow blossoms.

  ‘Venice once meant a lot to me,’ my aunt said rather unnecessarily.

  I don’t pretend to be a judge of these things, but I thought the effect exaggerated and not in the best of taste.

  ‘Such wonderful craftsmanship,’ my aunt said. ‘Wordsworth, be a dear and fetch us two whiskies. Augusta feels a teeny bit sad after the sad sad ceremony.’ She spoke to him as though he were a child – or a lover, but that relationship I was reluctant to accept.

  ‘Everything go OK?’ Wordsworth asked. ‘No bad medicine?’

  ‘There was no contretemps,’ my aunt said. ‘Oh gracious, Henry, you haven’t forgotten your parcel?’

  ‘No, no, I have it here.’

  ‘I think perhaps Wordsworth had better put it in the refrigerator.’

  ‘Quite unnecessary, Aunt Augusta. Ashes don’t deteriorate.’

  ‘No, I suppose not. How silly of me. But let Wordsworth put it in the kitchen just the same. We don’t want to be reminded all the time of my poor sister. Now let me show you my room. I have more of my Venice treasures there.’

  She had indeed. Her dressing-table gleamed with them: mirrors and powder-jars and ash-trays and bowls for safety pins. ‘They brighten the darkest day,’ she said. There was a very large double bed as curlicued as the glass. ‘I am especially attached to Venice,’ she explained, ‘because I began my real career there, and my travels. I have always been very fond of travel. It’s a great grief to me that my travels now are curtailed.’

  ‘Age strikes us all before we know it,’ I said.

  ‘Age? I was not referring to age. I hope I don’t look all that decrepit, Henry, but I like having a companion and Wordsworth is very occupied now because he’s studying to enter the London School of Economics. This is Wordsworth’s snuggery,’ and she opened the door of an adjoining room. It was crowded with glass Disney figures and worse – all the grinning mice and cats and hares from inferior American cartoon films, blown with as much care as the chandelier.

  ‘From Venice too,’ my aunt said, ‘clever but not so pretty. I thought them suitable, however, for a man’s room.’

  ‘Does he like them?’

  ‘He spends very little time there,’ my aunt said, ‘what with his studies and everything else …’

  ‘I wouldn’t like to wake up to them,’ I said.

  ‘He seldom does.’

  My aunt led me back to the sitting-room where Wordsworth had laid out three more Venetian glasses with gold rims and a jug of water with colours mingled like marble. The bottle of Black Label looked normal and out of place, rather like the only man in a dinner-jacket at a fancy-dress party, a comparison which came at once to my mind because I have found myself several times in that uncomfortable situation, since I have a rooted objection to dressing up.

  Wordsworth said, ‘The telephone talk all the bloody time while you not here. Ar tell them you don gone to a very smart funeral.’

  ‘It’s so convenient when one can tell the truth,’ my aunt said. ‘Was there no message?’

  ‘Oh, poor old Wordsworth not understand one bloody word. Ar say to them you no talk English. They go away double quick.’

  My aunt poured out larger portions of whisky than I am accustomed to.

  ‘A little more water plea
se, Aunt Augusta.’

  ‘I can say now to both of you how relieved I am that everything went without a hitch. I once attended a very important funeral – the wife of a famous man of letters who had not been the most faithful of husbands. It was soon after the first great war had ended, I was living in Brighton, and I was very interested at that time in the Fabians. I had learnt about them from your father when I was a girl. I arrived early as a spectator and I was leaning over the Communion rail – if you can call it that in a crematorium chapel – trying to make out the names on the wreaths. I was the first there, all alone with the flowers and the coffin. Wordsworth must forgive me for telling this story at such length – he has heard it before. Let me refresh your glass.’

  ‘No, no, Aunt Augusta. I have more than enough.’

  ‘Well, I suppose I was fumbling about a little too much and I must have accidentally touched a button. The coffin began to slide away, the doors opened, I could feel the hot air of the oven and hear the flap of the flames, the coffin went in and the doors closed, and at that very moment in walked the whole grand party, Mr and Mrs Bernard Shaw, Mr H. G. Wells, Miss E. Nesbit (to use her maiden name), Doctor Havelock Ellis, Mr Ramsay MacDonald, and the widower, while the clergyman (non-denominational of course) came through a door on the other side of the rail. Somebody began to play a humanist hymn by Edward Carpenter, “Cosmos, O Cosmos, Cosmos shall we call Thee?” But there was no coffin.’

  ‘Whatever did you do, Aunt Augusta?’

  ‘I buried my face in my handkerchief and simulated grief, but you know I don’t think anyone (except, I suppose, the clergyman and he kept dumb about it) noticed that the coffin wasn’t there. The widower certainly didn’t, but then he hadn’t noticed his wife for some years. Doctor Havelock Ellis made a very moving address (or so it seemed to me then: I hadn’t finally plumped for Catholicism, though I was on the brink) about the dignity of a funeral service conducted without illusions or rhetoric. He could truthfully have said without a corpse too. Everybody was quite satisfied. You can understand why I was very careful this morning not to fumble.’

  I looked at my aunt surreptitiously over the whisky. I didn’t know what to say. ‘How sad’ seemed inappropriate. I wondered whether the funeral had ever really taken place, though in the months that followed I was to realize that my aunt’s stories were always basically true – only minor details might sometimes be added to compose a picture. Wordsworth found the right words for me. He said, ‘We must allays go careful careful at a funeral.’ He added, ‘In Mendeland – ma first wife she was Mende – they go open deceased person’s back an they go take out the spleen. If spleen be too big, then deceased person was a witch an everyone mock the whole family and lef the funeral double quick. That happen to ma wife’s pa. He dead of malaria, but these ignorant people they don know malaria make the spleen big. So ma wife and her ma they go right away from Mendeland and come to Freetown. They don wan to be mocked by the neighbours.’

  ‘There must be a great many witches in Mendeland,’ my aunt said.

  ‘Ya’as, sure thing there are. Plenty too many.’

  I said, ‘I really think I must be going now, Aunt Augusta. I can’t keep my mind off the mowing-machine. It will be quite rusted in this rain.’

  ‘Will you miss your mother, Henry?’

  ‘Oh yes … yes,’ I said. I hadn’t really thought about it, so occupied had I been with all the arrangements for the funeral, the interviews with her solictor, with her bank manager with an estate agent arranging for the sale of her little house in North London. It is difficult too for a single man to know how to dispose of all the female trappings. Furniture can be auctioned, but what can one do with all the unfashionable underclothes of an old lady, the half-empty pots of old-fashioned cream? I asked my aunt.

  ‘I am afraid I didn’t share your mother’s taste in clothes, or even in cold cream. I would give them to her daily maid on condition she takes everything – everything.’

  ‘It has made me so happy meeting you, Aunt Augusta. You are my only close relative now.’

  ‘As far as you know,’ she said. ‘Your father had spells of activity.’

  ‘My poor stepmother … I shall never be able to think of anyone else as my mother.’

  ‘Better so.’

  ‘In a new block under construction my father was always very careful about furnishing the specimen flat. I used to think that sometimes he went to sleep in it in the afternoon. I suppose it might have been in one of those I was …’ I checked the word ‘conceived’ in deference to my aunt.

  ‘Better not to speculate,’ she said.

  ‘You will come one day and see my dahlias, won’t you? They are in full bloom.’

  ‘Of course, Henry, now that I have found you again I shan’t easily let you go. Do you enjoy travel?’

  ‘I’ve never had the opportunity.’

  ‘With Wordsworth so occupied we might make a little trip or two together.’

  ‘Gladly, Aunt Augusta.’ It never occurred to me that she meant further than the seaside.

  ‘I will telephone you,’ my aunt said.

  Wordsworth showed me to the door, and it was only outside, when I passed the Crown and Anchor, that I remembered I had left behind my little package. I wouldn’t have remembered at all if the girl in the jodhpurs had not said angrily as I pushed past the open window, ‘Peter can talk about nothing but cricket. All the summer it went on. Nothing but the fucking Ashes.’

  I don’t like to hear such adjectives on the lips of an attractive young girl, but her words reminded me sharply that I had left all that remained of my mother in Aunt Augusta’s kitchen. I went back to the street door. There was a row of bells with a kind of microphone above each of them. I touched the right one and heard Wordsworth’s voice. ‘Who be there?’

  I said, ‘It’s Henry Pulling.’

  ‘Don know anyone called that name.’

  ‘I’ve only just left you. I’m Aunt Augusta’s nephew.’

  ‘Oh, that guy,’ the voice said.

  ‘I left a parcel with you in the kitchen.’

  ‘You wan it back?’

  ‘Please, if it’s not too much trouble …’

  Human communication, it sometimes seems to me, involves an exaggerated amount of time. How briefly and to the point people always seem to speak on the stage or on the screen, while in real life we stumble from phrase to phrase with endless repetition.

  ‘A brown-paper parcel?’ Wordsworth’s voice asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You wan me bring it down right away?’

  ‘Yes, if it’s not too much …’

  ‘It’s a bloody lot of trouble,’ Wordsworth said. ‘Stay there.’

  I was prepared to be very cold to him when he brought the parcel, but he opened the street door wearing a friendly grin.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, with as much coldness as I could muster, ‘for the great trouble you have taken.’

  I noticed that the parcel was no longer sealed. ‘Has somebody opened this?’

  ‘Ar jus wan to see what you got there.’

  ‘You might have asked me.’

  ‘Why, man,’ he said, ‘you not offended at Wordsworth?’

  ‘I didn’t like the way you spoke just now.’

  ‘Man, it’s jus that little mike there. Ar wan to make it say all kind of rude things. There ar am up there, and down there ma voice is, popping out into the street where no one see it’s only old Wordsworth. It’s a sort of power, man. Like the burning bush when he spoke to old Moses. One day it was the parson come from St George’s in the square. An he says in a dear brethren sort of voice, “I wonder, Miss Bertram, if I could come up and have a little chat about our bazaar.” “Sure, man,” ar say, “you wearing your dog collar?” “Why, yes,” he say, “of course, who is that?” “Man,” ar say, “you better put on a muzzle too before you go come up here.”’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He wen away and never come back. Your auntie lau
gh like hell when ar told her. But ar didn’t mean him harm. It was just old Wordsworth tempted by that little old mike.’

  ‘Are you really studying for the London School of Economics?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, tha’s a joke your auntie makes. Ar was workin at the Grenada Palace. Ar had a uniform. Jus lak a general. She lak ma uniform. She stop an say, “Are you the Emperor Jones?” “No, ma’m,” I say, “arm only old Wordsworth.” “Oh,” she say, “thou child of joy, shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy shepherd boy.” “You write that down for me,” ar say. “It sound good. Ar like it.” Ar say it over and over. Ar know it now good lak a hymn.’

  I was a little confused by his garrulity. ‘Well, Wordsworth,’ I said, ‘thank you for all your trouble and I hope one day I shall see you again.’

  ‘This here mighty important parcel?’

  ‘Yes. I suppose it is.’

  ‘Then ar think you owe a dash to old Wordsworth,’ he said.

  ‘A dash?’

  ‘A CTC.’

  Remembering what my aunt had told me, I went quickly away.

  Just as I had expected my new lawn-mower was wet all over: I dried it carefully and oiled the blades before I did anything else. Then I boiled myself two eggs and made a cup of tea for lunch. I had much to think about. Could I accept my aunt’s story and in that case who was my mother? I tried to remember the friends my mother had of her own age, but what was the good of that? The friendship would have been broken before my birth. If indeed she had been only a stepmother to me, did I still want to place her ashes among my dahlias? While I washed up my lunch I was sorely tempted to wash out the urn as well into the sink. It would serve very well for the home-made jam which I was promising myself to make next year – a man in retirement must have his hobbies if he is not to age too fast – and the urn would have looked quite handsome on the tea table. It was a little sombre, but a sombre jar was well suited for damson jelly or for black-berry-and-apple jam. I was seriously tempted, but I remembered how kind my stepmother had been to me in her rather stern way when I was a child, and how could I tell that my aunt was speaking the truth? So I went out into the garden and chose a spot among the dahlias where the plinth could be built.