Travels With My Aunt Read online

  My aunt put down her glass and asked the woman behind the bar, ‘Did you ever hear of the doggies’ church?’

  ‘I seem to remember hearing something, but it was donkey’s years ago, wasn’t it? Long before my time. Somewhere in Hove, wasn’t it?’

  ‘No, dear. Not a hundred yards from where you are standing now. We used to come to the Cricketers’ after the service. The Rev. Curran and me.’

  ‘Didn’t the police interfere or something?’

  ‘They tried to make out that he had no right to the title of Rev. But we pointed out that it stood for Revered and not Reverend in our church, and we didn’t belong to the established. They couldn’t touch us, we were breakaways like Wesley, and we had all the dog-owners of Brighton and Hove behind us – they even came over from as far as Hastings. The police tried to get us once under the Blasphemy Act, but nobody could find any blasphemy in our services. They were very very solemn. Curran wanted to start the churching of bitches after the puppies came, but I said that was going too far – even the Church of England had abandoned churching. Then there was the question of marrying divorced couples – I thought it would treble our income, but there it was Curran who stood firm. “We don’t recognize divorce,” he said, and he was quite right – it would have sullied the sentiment.’

  ‘Did the police win in the end?’ I asked.

  ‘They always do. They had him up for speaking to girls on the front, and a lot was said in court that wasn’t apropos. I was young and angry and uncomprehending, and I wouldn’t help him any more. No wonder he abandoned me and went to look for Hannibal. No one can stand not being forgiven. That’s God’s privilege.’

  We left the Cricketers’ and my aunt took a turning this way and a turning that until we came to a shuttered hall and a sign which read: ‘Text for the Week. “If thou hast run with the footmen, and they have wearied thee, Then how canst thou contend with horses? Jeremiah 12.”’ I can’t say that I understood the meaning very well, unless it was a warning against Brighton races, but perhaps the ambiguity was the attraction. The sect, I noticed, was called The Children of Jeremiah.

  ‘This was where we held our services,’ Aunt Augusta said. ‘Sometimes you could hardly hear the words for the barking. “It’s their form of prayer,” Curran would say, “let each pray after his own fashion,” and sometimes they lay quite peacefully licking their parts. “Cleansing themselves for the House of the Lord,” Curran would say. It makes me a little sad to see strangers here now. And I never much cared for the prophet Jeremiah.’

  ‘I know little about Jeremiah.’

  ‘They sank him in the mud,’ Aunt Augusta said. ‘I studied the Bible very carefully in those days, but there was little that was favourable to dogs in the Old Testament. Tobias took his dog with him on his journey with the angel, but it played no part in the story at all, not even when a fish tried to eat Tobias. A dog was an unclean beast, of course, in those times. He only came into his own with Christianity. It was the Christians who began to carve dogs in stone in the cathedrals, and even while they were still doubtful about women’s souls they were beginning to think that maybe a dog had one, though they couldn’t get the Pope to pronounce one way or the other, not even the Archbishop of Canterbury. It was left to Curran.’

  ‘A big responsibility,’ I said. I couldn’t make out whether she was serious about Curran or not.

  ‘It was Curran who set me reading theology,’ Aunt Augusta said. ‘He wanted references to dogs. It wasn’t easy to find any – even in St Francis de Sales. I found lots about fleas and butterflies and stags and elephants and spiders and crocodiles in St Francis but a strange neglect of dogs. Once I had a terrible shock. I said to Curran, “It’s no good. We can’t go on. Look what I’ve just found in the Apocalypse. Jesus is saying who can enter the city of God. Just listen to this – ‘Without are dogs and sorcerers and whoremongers and murderers and idolaters, and whosoever loveth or maketh a lie.’ You see the company dogs are supposed to keep?”

  ‘“It proves our point,” Curran said. “Whoremongers and murderers and the rest – they all have souls, don’t they? They only have to repent, and it’s the same with dogs. The dogs who come to our church have repented. They don’t consort any more with whoremongers and sorcerers. They live with respectable people in Brunswick Square or Royal Crescent.” Do you know that Curran was so little put off by the Apocalypse he actually preached a sermon on that very text, telling people that it was their responsibility to see that their dogs didn’t back-slide? “Loose the lead and spoil the dog,” he said. “There are only too many murderers in Brighton and whoremongers at the Metropole all ready to pick up what you loose. And as for sorcerers –” Luckily Hatty, who was with us by that time, had not yet become a fortune-teller. It would have spoilt the image.’

  ‘He was a good preacher?’

  ‘It was music to hear him,’ she said with happy regret, and we began to walk back towards the front; we could hear the shingle turning over from a long way away. ‘He was not exclusive,’ my aunt said. ‘For him dogs were like the House of Israel, but he was an apostle also to the Gentiles – and the Gentiles, to Curran, included sparrows and parrots and white mice – not cats, cats he always regarded as Pharisees. Of course no cat dared to come into the church with all those dogs around, but there was one who used to sit in the window of a house opposite and sneer when the congregation came out. Curran excluded fish too – it would be too shocking to eat something with a soul, he said. Elephants he had a great feeling for, which was generous of him considering Hannibal had trodden on his toe. Let’s sit down here, Henry. I always find Guinness a little tiring.’

  We sat down in a shelter. The lights ran out to sea along the Palace Pier and the edge of the water was white with phosphorescence. The waves were continually pulled up along the beach and pulled back as though someone were making a bed and couldn’t get the sheet to lie properly. A bit of pop music came from the dance hall standing there like a blockade ship a hundred yards out. This trip was quite an adventure, I thought to myself, little knowing how small a one it would seem in retrospect.

  ‘I found a lovely piece about elephants once in St Francis de Sales,’ Aunt Augusta said, ‘and Curran used it in his last sermon – after all that business with the girls had upset me. I really think what he wanted was to tell me it was me he loved, but I was a hard young woman in those days and I wouldn’t listen. I’ve always kept the piece though in my purse and, when I read it, it’s not the elephant that I see now, it’s Curran. He was a fine fellow – not as big as Wordsworth but a good deal more sensitive.’

  She fumbled in her bag and found her purse. ‘You read it to me, dear, I can’t see properly in this light.’

  I held the rather yellowed creased paper at an angle to catch one of the lights of the front. It wasn’t easy to read, though my aunt’s handwriting was young and bold, because of the creases. ‘“The elephant”,’ I read, ‘“is only a huge animal, but he is the most worthy of beasts that lives on the earth, and the most intelligent. I will give you an example of his excellence; he …”’ The writing ran along a crease and I couldn’t read it, but my aunt chimed gently in. ‘“He never changes his mate and he tenderly loves the one of his choice.” Go on, dear.’

  ‘“With whom”,’ I read, ‘“nevertheless he mates but every third year, and then for five days only and so secretly that he has never been seen to do so.”’

  ‘He was trying to explain,’ my aunt said, ‘I am sure of it now, that if he had been a little slack in his attentions, it was only because of the girls – he didn’t love me less.’

  ‘“But he is to be seen again on the sixth day, on which day, before doing anything else, he goes straight to some river and he bathes his whole body, for he has no desire to return to the herd until he has purified himself.”’

  ‘Curran was always a clean man,’ my aunt said. ‘Thank you, dear, you read it very well.’

  ‘It doesn’t seem very applicable to dogs,’ I sai
d.

  ‘He turned it so beautifully that no one noticed, and it was really directed at me. I remember he had a special dogs’ shampoo which had been blessed at the altar on sale outside the church door that Sunday.’

  ‘What became of Curran?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ Aunt Augusta said. ‘He must have left his church, for he couldn’t have carried on without me. Hatty hadn’t the right touch for a deaconess. I dream of him sometimes – but he would be ninety years old now, and I find it hard to picture him as an old man. Well, Henry, I think it is time for us both to sleep.’

  All the same I found sleep difficult to attain, even in my comfortable bed at the Royal Albion. The lights of the Palace Pier sparkled on the ceiling, and round and round, in my head, went the figures of Wordsworth and Curran, the elephant and the dogs of Hove, the mystery of my birth, the ashes of my mother who was not my mother, and my father asleep in the bath. This was not the simple life which I had known at the bank, where I could judge a client’s character by his credits and debits. I had a sense of fear and exhilaration too, as the music pounded from the Pier and the phosphorescence rolled up the beach.

  7

  THE affair of my mother’s ashes was not settled so easily as I had anticipated (I call her my mother still, because at this period I had no real evidence that my aunt was telling me the truth). No urn was awaiting me in the house when I returned from Brighton, and so I rang up Scotland Yard and asked for Detective-Sergeant Sparrow. I was put on without delay to a voice which was distinctly not Sparrow’s. It sounded very similar to that of a rear-admiral whom I had once had as a client. (I was very glad when he changed his account to the National Provincial Bank, for he treated my clerks like ordinary seamen and myself like a sub-lieutenant who had been court-martialled for keeping the mess books improperly.)

  ‘Can I speak to Detective-Sergeant Sparrow?’ I asked.

  ‘On what business?’ whoever it was rapped back.

  ‘I have not yet received my mother’s ashes,’ I said.

  ‘This is Scotland Yard, Assistant Commissioner’s Office, and not a crematorium,’ the voice replied and rang off.

  It took me a long while (because of engaged lines) to get the same gritty voice on the line again.

  ‘I want Detective-Sergeant Sparrow,’ I said.

  ‘On what business?’

  I was ready this time and prepared to be ruder than the voice could be.

  ‘Police business of course,’ I said. ‘What other business do you deal in?’ It was almost as though my aunt were speaking through me.

  ‘Detective-Sergeant Sparrow is out. You had better leave a message.’

  ‘Ask him to ring Mr Pulling, Mr Henry Pulling.’

  ‘What address? What telephone number?’ he snapped as though he suspected me to be some unsavoury police informer.

  ‘He knows them both. I am not going to repeat them unnecessarily. Tell him I am disappointed at his failure to keep a solemn promise.’ I rang off before the other had time for a word in reply. Going out to the dahlias I gave myself the rare award of a satisfied smile. I had never spoken to the rear-admiral like that.

  My new cactus dahlias were doing well, and after my trip to Brighton their names gave me some of the pleasure of travel: Rotterdam, a deeper red than a pillar-box, and Dentelle de Venise with spikes sparkling like hoar-frost. I thought that next year I would plant some Pride of Berlin to make a trio of cities. The telephone disturbed my happy ruminations. It was Sparrow.

  I said to him firmly, ‘I hope you have a good excuse for failing to return the ashes.’

  ‘I certainly have, sir. There’s more cannabis than ashes in your urn.’

  ‘I don’t believe you. How could my mother possibly …?’

  ‘We can hardly suspect your mother, sir, can we? As I told you, I think the man Wordsworth took advantage of your call. Luckily for your story there are some human ashes in the urn, though Wordsworth must have dumped most of them down the sink to make room. Did you hear any sound of running water?’

  ‘We were drinking whisky. He certainly filled a jug of water.’

  ‘That must have been the moment, sir.’

  ‘In any case I would like to have back the ashes that remain.’

  ‘It isn’t practicable, sir. Human ashes have a kind of sticky quality. They adhere very closely to any substance, which in this case is pot. I am sending you back the urn by registered post. I suggest, sir, that you place it just where you intended and forget the unfortunate circumstances.’

  ‘But the urn will be empty.’

  ‘Memorials are often detached from the remains of the deceased. War memorials are an example.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I suppose there’s nothing to be done. It won’t feel the same at all. I hope you don’t suspect my aunt had any hand in this?’

  ‘An old lady like that? Oh no, sir. She was obviously deceived by her valet.’

  ‘What valet?’

  ‘Why, Wordsworth, sir – who else?’ I thought it best not to enlighten him about their relationship.

  ‘My aunt thinks Wordsworth may be in Paris.’

  ‘Very likely, sir.’

  ‘What will you do about it?’

  ‘There’s nothing we can do. He hasn’t committed an extraditable offence. Of course, if he ever returns … He has a British passport.’ There was a note of malicious longing in Detective-Sergeant Sparrow’s voice that made me feel, for a moment, a partisan of Wordsworth. I said, ‘I sincerely hope he won’t.’

  ‘You surprise and disappoint me, sir.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I hadn’t taken you for one of that kind.’

  ‘What kind?’

  ‘People who talk about there being no harm in pot.’

  ‘Is there?’

  ‘From our experience, sir, nearly all the cases hooked on hard drugs begin with pot.’

  ‘And from my experience, Sparrow, all or nearly all the alcoholics I know have started with a small whisky or a glass of wine. I even had a client who was first hooked, as you call it, on mild and bitter. In the end because of his frequent absences on a cure he had to give his wife a power of attorney.’ I rang off. It occurred to me with a certain pleasure that I had sowed a little confusion in Detective-Sergeant Sparrow’s mind – not so much confusion on the subject of cannabis but confusion about my character, the character of a retired bank manager. I discovered for the first time in myself a streak of anarchy. Had it been perhaps the result of my visit to Brighton or was it possibly my aunt’s influence (and yet I was not a man easily influenced), or some bacteria in the Pulling blood? I found a buried affection for my father reviving in me. He had been a very patient as well as a very sleepy man, and yet there was about his patience something unaccountable: it might well have been absence of mind rather than patience – or even indifference. He might have been all the time, without our knowing it, elsewhere. I remembered the ambiguous reproaches launched against him by my mother. They seemed to confirm my aunt’s story, for they possessed the nagging qualities of an unsatisfied woman. Imprisoned by ambitions which she had never realized, my mother had never known freedom. Freedom, I thought, comes only to the successful and in his trade my father was a success. If a client didn’t like my father’s manner or his estimates, he could go elsewhere. My father wouldn’t have cared. Perhaps it is freedom, of speech and conduct, which is really envied by the unsuccessful, not money or even power.

  It was with these muddled and unaccustomed ideas in my mind that I awaited the arrival of my aunt for dinner. We had arranged the rendezvous before leaving the Brighton Belle at Victoria the day before. As soon as she arrived I told her about Sergeant Sparrow, but she treated my story with surprising indifference, saying only that Wordsworth should have been ‘more careful’. Then I took her out and showed her my dahlias.

  ‘I have always preferred cut flowers,’ she said, and I had a sudden vision of strange continental gentlemen offering her bouquets of roses and maidenhair fern
bound up in tissue paper.

  I pointed out to her the site where I had thought to put the urn in memory of my mother.

  ‘Poor Angelica,’ she said, ‘she never understood men,’ and that was all. It was as though she had read my thoughts and commented on them.

  I had dialled CHICKEN and the dinner arrived exactly as ordered, the main course only needing to be put into the oven for a few minutes, while we ate the smoked salmon. Living alone I had been a regular customer whenever there was a client to entertain or my mother on her weekly visit. Now for months I had neglected Chicken, for there were no longer any clients and my mother, during her last illness, had been too ill to make the journey from Golders Green.

  We drank sherry with the smoked salmon, and as some small return for my aunt’s generosity to me in Brighton I had bought a bottle of Burgundy, Chambertin 1959, Sir Arthur Keene’s favourite, to go with the Chicken à la King. When the wine had spread a pleasant glow through both our minds my aunt reverted to my conversation with Sergeant Sparrow.

  ‘He is determined,’ she said, ‘that Wordsworth is the guilty party, yet it might equally well be one of us. I don’t think the sergeant is a racialist, but he is class-conscious, and though the smoking of pot depends on no class-barrier, he prefers to think otherwise and to put the blame on poor Wordsworth.’

  ‘You and I can give each other an alibi,’ I said, ‘and Wordsworth did run away.’

  ‘We could have been in collusion, and Wordsworth might be taking his annual holiday. No,’ she went on, ‘the mind of a policeman is set firmly in a groove. I remember once when I was in Tunis a travelling company was there who were playing Hamlet in Arabic. Someone saw to it that in the Interlude the Player King was really killed – or rather not quite killed but severely damaged in the right ear – by molten lead. And who do you suppose the police at once suspected? Not the man who poured the lead in, although he must have been aware that the ladle wasn’t empty and was hot to the touch. Oh no, they knew Shakespeare’s play too well for that, and so they arrested Hamlet’s uncle.’