Travels With My Aunt Read online

  ‘What a lot of travelling you have done in your day, Aunt Augusta.’

  ‘I haven’t reached nightfall yet,’ she said. ‘If I had a companion I would be off tomorrow, but I can no longer lift a heavy suitcase, and there is a distressing lack of porters nowadays. As you noticed at Victoria.’

  ‘We might one day,’ I said, ‘continue our seaside excursions. I remember many years ago visiting Weymouth. There was a very pleasant green statue of George III on the front.’

  ‘I have booked two couchettes a week from today on the Orient Express.’

  I looked at her in amazement. ‘Where to?’ I asked.

  ‘Istanbul, of course.’

  ‘But it takes days …’

  ‘Three nights to be exact.’

  ‘If you want to go to Istanbul surely it would be easier and less expensive to fly?’

  ‘I only take a plane,’ my aunt said, ‘when there is no alternative means of travel.’

  ‘It’s really quite safe.’

  ‘It is a matter of choice, not nerves,’ Aunt Augusta said. ‘I knew Wilbur Wright very well indeed at one time. He took me for several trips. I always felt quite secure in his contraptions. But I cannot bear being spoken to all the time by irrelevant loudspeakers. One is not badgered at a railway station. An airport always reminds me of a Butlin’s Camp.’

  ‘If you are thinking of me as a companion …’

  ‘Of course I am, Henry.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Aunt Augusta, but a bank manager’s pension is not a generous one.’

  ‘I shall naturally pay all expenses. Give me another glass of wine, Henry. It’s excellent.’

  ‘I’m not really accustomed to foreign travel. You’d find me …’

  ‘You will take to it quickly enough in my company. The Pullings have all been great travellers. I think I must have caught the infection through your father.’

  ‘Surely not my father … He never travelled further than Central London.’

  ‘He travelled from one woman to another, Henry, all through his life. That comes to much the same thing. New landscapes, new customs. The accumulation of memories. A long life is not a question of years. A man without memories might reach the age of a hundred and feel that his life had been a very brief one. Your father once said to me, “The first girl I ever slept with was called Rose. Oddly enough she worked in a flower shop. It really seems a century ago.” And then there was your uncle …’

  ‘I didn’t know I had an uncle.’

  ‘He was fifteen years older than your father and he died when you were very young.’

  ‘He was a great traveller?’

  ‘It took an odd form,’ my aunt said, ‘in the end.’ I wish I could reproduce more clearly the tones of her voice. She enjoyed talking, she enjoyed telling a story. She formed her sentences carefully like a slow writer who foresees ahead of him the next sentence and guides his pen towards it. Not for her the broken phrase, the lapse of continuity. There was something classically precise, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say old-world, in her diction. The bizarre phrase, and occasionally, it must be agreed, a shocking one, gleamed all the more brightly from the old setting. As I grew to know her better, I began to regard her as bronze rather than brazen, a bronze which has been smoothed and polished by touch, like the horse’s knee in the lounge of the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo, which she once described to me, caressed by generations of gamblers.

  ‘Your uncle was a bookmaker known as Jo,’ Aunt Augusta said. ‘A very fat man. I don’t know why I say that, but I have always liked fat men. They have given up all unnecessary effort, for they have had the sense to realize that women do not, as men do, fall in love with physical beauty. Curran was stout and so was your father. It’s easier to feel at home with a fat man. Perhaps travelling with me you will put on a little weight yourself. You had the misfortune to choose a nervous profession.’

  ‘I have certainly never banted for the sake of a woman,’ I said jokingly.

  ‘You must tell me all about your women one day. In the Orient Express we shall have plenty of time for talk. But now I am speaking to you of your uncle Jo. His was a very curious case. He made a substantial fortune as a bookmaker, yet more and more his only real desire was to travel. Perhaps the horses continually running by, while he had to remain stationary on a little platform with a signboard Honest Jo Pulling, made him restless. He used to say that one race meeting merged into another and life went by as rapidly as a yearling out of Indian Queen. He wanted to slow life up and he quite rightly felt that by travelling he would make time move with less rapidity. You have noticed it yourself, I expect, on a holiday. If you stay in one place, the holiday passes like a flash, but if you go to three places, the holiday seems to last at least three times as long.’

  ‘Is that why you have travelled so much, Aunt Augusta?’

  ‘At first I travelled for my living,’ Aunt Augusta replied. ‘That was in Italy. After Paris, after Brighton. I had left home before you were born. Your father and mother wished to be alone, and in my case I never got on very well with Angelica. The two As we were always called. People used to say my name fitted me because I seemed proud as a young girl, but no one said my sister’s name fitted her. A saint she may well have been, but a very severe saint. She was certainly not angelic.’

  One of the few remarks of age which I noticed in my aunt was her readiness to abandon one anecdote while it was yet unfinished for another. Her conversation was rather like an American magazine where you have to pursue a story, skipping from page twenty to page ninety-eight and turning over all kinds of subjects in between: childhood delinquency, some novel cocktail recipes, the love life of a film star, and even quite a different fiction to the one so abruptly interrupted.

  ‘The question of names,’ my aunt said, ‘is an interesting one. Your own Christian name is safe and colourless. It is better than being given a name like Ernest, which has to be lived up to. I once knew a girl called Comfort and her life was a very sad one. Unhappy men were constantly attracted to her simply by reason of her name, when all the time, poor dear, it was really she who needed the comfort from them. She fell unhappily in love with a man called Courage, who was desperately afraid of mice, but in the end she married a man called Payne and killed herself in what Americans call a comfort station. I would have thought it a funny story if I hadn’t known her.’

  ‘You were telling me about my Uncle Jo,’ I said.

  ‘I know that. I was saying that he wanted to make life last longer. So he decided on a tour round the world (there were no currency restrictions in those days), and he began his tour curiously enough with the Simplon Orient, the train we are travelling by next week. From Turkey he planned to go to Persia, Russia, India, Malaya, Hong Kong, China, Japan, Hawaii, Tahiti, USA, South America, Australia, New Zealand perhaps – somewhere he intended to take a boat home. Unfortunately he was carried off the train at Venice right at the start on a stretcher, after a stroke.’

  ‘How very sad.’

  ‘It didn’t alter at all his desire for a long life. I was working in Venice at the time, and I went to see him. He had decided that if he couldn’t travel physically, he would travel mentally. He asked me if I could find him a house of three hundred and sixty-five rooms so that he could live for a day and a night in each. In that way he thought life would seem almost interminable. The fact that he had probably not long to live had only heightened his passion to extend what was left of it. I told him that, short of the Royal Palace at Naples, I doubted whether such a house existed. Even the Palace in Rome probably contained fewer rooms.’

  ‘He could have changed rooms less frequently in a smaller house.’

  ‘He said that then he would notice the pattern. It would be no more than he was already accustomed to, travelling between Newmarket, Epsom, Goodwood and Brighton. He wanted time to forget the room which he had left before he returned to it again, and there must be opportunity too to redecorate it in a few essentials. You know there
was a brothel in Paris in the Rue de Provence between the last two wars (oh, I forgot. There have been many wars since, haven’t there, but they don’t seem to belong to us like those two do). This brothel had rooms decorated in various styles – the far West, China, India, that kind of thing. My uncle had much the same idea for his house.’

  ‘But surely he never found one,’ I exclaimed.

  ‘In the end he was forced to compromise. I was afraid for a time that the best we could do would be twelve bedrooms – one room a month – but a short while afterwards, through one of my clients in Milan …’

  ‘I thought you were working in Venice,’ I interrupted with some suspicion.

  ‘The business I was in,’ my aunt said, ‘was peripatetic. We moved around – a fortnight’s season in Venice, the same in Milan, Florence and Rome, then back to Venice. It was known as la quindicina.’

  ‘You were in a theatre company?’ I asked.

  ‘The description will serve,’ my aunt said with that recurring ambiguity of hers. ‘You must remember I was very young in those days.’

  ‘Acting needs no excuse.’

  ‘I wasn’t excusing myself,’ Aunt Augusta said sharply, ‘I was explaining. In a profession like that, age is a handicap. I was lucky enough to leave in good time. Thanks to Mr Visconti.’

  ‘Who was Visconti?’

  ‘We were talking about your Uncle Jo. I found an old house in the country which had once been a palazzo or a castello or something of the kind. It was almost in ruins and there were gypsies camping in some of the lower rooms and in the cellar – an enormous cellar which ran under the whole ground floor. It had been used for wine, and there was a great empty tun abandoned there because it had cracked with age. Once there had been vineyards around the house, but an autostrada had been built right across the estate not a hundred yards from the house, and the cars ran by all day between Milan and Rome and at night the big lorries passed. A few knotted worn-out roots of old vines were all that remained. There was only one bathroom in the whole house (the water had been cut off long ago by the failure of the electric pump), and only one lavatory, on the top floor in a sort of tower, but of course there was no water there either. You can imagine it wasn’t the sort of house anyone could sell easily – it had been on the market for twenty years and the owner was a mongoloid orphan in an asylum. The lawyers talked about historic values, but Mr Visconti knew all about history as you could guess from his name. Of course he advised strongly against the purchase, but after all poor Jo was unlikely to live long and he might as well be made happy. I had counted up the rooms, and if you divided the cellar into four with partitions and included the lavatory and bathroom and kitchen, you could bring the total up to fifty-two. When I told Jo he was delighted. A room for every week of the year, he said. I had to put a bed in every one, even in the bathroom and kitchen. There wasn’t room for a bed in the lavatory, but I bought a particularly comfortable chair with a footstool and I thought we could always leave that room to the last – I didn’t think Jo would survive long enough to reach it. He had a nurse who was to follow him from room to room, sleeping one week behind him, as it were. I was afraid he would insist on a different nurse at every stopping place, but he liked her well enough to keep her as a travelling companion.’

  ‘What an extraordinary arrangement.’

  ‘It worked very well. When Jo was in his fifteenth room he told me – I was back that week in Milan on my tour and I came out to see him with Mr Visconti on my day off – that it really seemed at least a year since he had moved in. He was going on next day to the sixteenth room on the floor above with a different view and his suitcases were all packed and ready (he insisted on everything being moved by suitcase, and I had found a second-hand one which was already decorated with labels from all kinds of famous hotels – the George V in Paris, the Quisisana in Capri, the Excelsior in Rome, Raffles in Singapore, Shepheard’s in Cairo, the Pera Palace in Istanbul).

  ‘Poor Jo! I’ve seldom seen a happier man. He was certain that death would not catch him before he reached the fifty-second room, and if fifteen rooms had seemed like a year, then he had several years of travel still before him. The nurse told me that about the fourth day in each room he would get a little restless with the wanderlust, and the first day in the new room he would spend more than his usual time in sleep, tired after the journey. He began in the cellar and worked his way upwards until at last he reached the top floor, and he was already beginning to talk of revisiting his old haunts. “We’ll take them in a different order this time,” he said, “and come at them from a different direction.” He was content to leave the lavatory to the last. “After all these luxury rooms,” he said, “it would be fun to rough it a bit. Roughing it keeps one young. I don’t want to be like one of those old codgers one sees in the Cunard travelling first-class and complaining of the caviar.” Then it was that in the fifty-first room that he had his second stroke. It paralysed him down one side and made speech difficult. I was in Venice at the time, but I got permission to leave the company for a couple of days and Mr Visconti drove me to Jo’s palazzo. They were having a lot of difficulty with him. He had spent seven days in the fifty-first room before the stroke knocked him out, but the doctor was insisting that he remain in the same bed without a move for at least another ten days. “Any ordinary man,” the doctor said to me, “would be content to lie still for a while.”

  ‘“He wants to live as long as possible,” I told him.

  ‘“In that case he should stay where he is till the end. With any luck he’ll have two or three more years.”

  ‘I told Jo what the doctor said, and he mouthed a reply. I thought I made out, “Not enough.”

  ‘He stayed quiet that night and all the next morning, and the nurse believed that he had resigned himself to staying where he was. She left him sleeping and came down to my room for a cup of tea. Mr Visconti had bought some cream cakes in Milan at the good pastry-cook’s near the cathedral. Suddenly from up the stairs there came a strange grating noise. “Mamma mia,” the nurse said, “what’s that?” It sounded as though someone were shifting the furniture. We ran upstairs and what do you think? Jo Pulling was out of bed. He had fixed an old club tie of his, the Froth-blowers or the Mustard Club or something of the kind, to the handle of the suitcase because he had no strength in his legs, and he was crawling down the passage towards the lavatory tower pulling the suitcase after him. I shouted for him to stop, but he paid no attention. It was painful to look at him, he was going so slowly, with such an effort. It was a tiled passage and every tile he crossed cost him enormous exertion. He collapsed before we reached him and lay there panting, and the saddest thing of all to me was that he made a little pool of wee-wee on the tiles. We were afraid to move him before the doctor came. We brought a pillow and put it under his head and the nurse gave him one of his pills. “Cattivo,” she said in Italian, which means, “You bad old man,” and he grinned at the two of us and brought out the last sentence which he ever spoke, deformed a bit but I could understand it very well. “Seemed like a whole lifetime,” he said and he died before the doctor came. He was right in his way to make that last trip against the doctor’s orders. The doctor had only promised him a few years.’

  ‘He died in the passage?’ I asked.

  ‘He died on his travels,’ my aunt said in a tone of reproof. ‘As he would have wished.’

  ‘“Here he lies where he longed to be,”’ I quoted in order to please my aunt, though I couldn’t help remembering that Uncle Jo had not succeeded in reaching the lavatory door.

  ‘Home is the hunter, home from the sea,’ my aunt finished the quotation in her own fashion, ‘And the sailor home from the hill.’

  We were silent for quite a while after that as we finished the Chicken à la King. It was a little like the two minutes’ silence on Armistice Day. I remembered that, when I was a boy, I used to wonder whether there was really a corpse buried there at the Cenotaph, for governments are usually economical w
ith sentiment and try to arouse it in the cheapest possible way. A brilliant advertising slogan doesn’t need a body, a box of earth would do just as well, and now I began to wonder too about Uncle Jo. Was my aunt a little imaginative? Perhaps the stories of Jo, of my father and of my mother were not entirely true.

  Without breaking the silence I took a reverent glass of Chambertin to Uncle Jo’s memory, whether he existed or not. The unaccustomed wine sang irresponsibly in my head. What did the truth matter? All characters once dead, if they continue to exist in memory at all, tend to become fictions. Hamlet is no less real now than Winston Churchill, and Jo Pulling no less historical than Don Quixote. I betrayed myself with a hiccup while I changed our plates, and with the blue cheese the sense of material problems returned.

  ‘Uncle Jo,’ I said, ‘was lucky to have no currency restrictions. He couldn’t have afforded to die like that on a tourist allowance.’

  ‘They were great days,’ Aunt Augusta said.

  ‘How are we going to manage on ours?’ I asked. ‘With fifty pounds each we shall not be able to stay very long in Istanbul.’

  ‘Currency restrictions have never seriously bothered me,’ my aunt said. ‘There are ways and means.’

  ‘I hope you don’t plan anything illegal.’

  ‘I have never planned anything illegal in my life,’ Aunt Augusta said. ‘How could I plan anything of the kind when I have never read any of the laws and have no idea what they are?’

  8

  IT was my aunt who suggested that we should fly as far as Paris. I was a little surprised after what she had just said, for there was certainly in this case an alternative means of travel. I pointed out the inconsistency. ‘There are reasons,’ Aunt Augusta said. ‘Cogent reasons. I know the ropes at Heathrow.’