A Charm of Powerful Trouble (4 page)

Great-Aunt Emmeline - Aunt Em - was Emma's father's aunt; she had brought him up after his mother died. He died when my mother, Emma, was two and her sister Beth was four; Emma remembered nothing of him.

Their mother didn't visit Aunt Em after her husband's death, and nor did Aunt Em come to visit them, though they wrote occasional letters and there were presents at Christmas and on birthdays. The years just slipped by Then when Beth was sixteen her mother felt she was old enough to go alone on the train for a visit, and two years later, when she was sixteen, it was Emma's turn.

The thing that terrified Emma about going to visit Aunt Em was the idea that once she got there she'd be trapped somehow, and never be able to leave. But a thrill of anticipation went through her as well: that and the terror seemed to belong deliciously together. Until now, she felt, she'd been half asleep, waiting for her life to begin. Here, perhaps, was the great thing she'd been longing for, though what the great thing might consist of she could scarcely imagine.

Beth had set herself up as the expert on Aunt Em, who preferred to be called just Em. Emma always thought of the name as a single letter: M. Beth told Emma that their great-aunt always had a drink of Hospital brandy, standing at the kitchen table, before she went to bed at night. ‘Don't let her give you any!' Beth warned.

She said that Aunt Em had been a twin, but that her twin sister had died of scarlet fever when she was still a baby The nursery door was locked afterwards, and everything kept exactly as it was when the child died. The nursery was upstairs, on the upper floor of the house. Aunt Em lived in the downstairs part only, now, and never went up there.

She said that Aunt Em had a white whisker on her chin, and that it prickled when she kissed you.

And finally she told Emma, in that dramatic voice that bore the unmistakable authority of the older sister, that when Aunt Em died, Emma would have to go and live forever in the vast old house in the country: ‘So that there will always be an Aunt Em living there.'

It was a long, rocking, rolling journey north. The train slid through the suburbs of Sydney, gliding surreptitiously along the tracks. It was night, and Emma saw her face reflected in the glass, wan and anxious-looking. She pressed her lips together and looked away. She could smell the cracked varnish of the window frame as she leaned her head against it. The green leather seats were impregnated with the smell of soot. People entering the compartment wrestled with the handle of a door that slid about with the movement of the train. Finally, the lights went off and, surrounded by the smells of strangers, Emma snuggled down under the blanket her mother had pressed upon her for the trip, and slept.

In the morning there were cow paddocks, and kangaroos fleeing through stands of eucalypts. Then the vegetation became denser. The train followed a creek fringed by trees struggling under the weight of vines. The line was cut into the hillsides, and they seemed to be pushing against the forest at each turn. Emma thought she would be swallowed by all that lush, green dampness.

And then she was at Aunt Em's station, a tiny faded weatherboard building surrounded by tree ferns and palms, a station so small it was hardly a station at all, to Emma's city-bred eyes. An old woman waited on the platform, watching alertly. She and Emma recognised each other at once, and would have even if they hadn't been the only people there.

Aunt Em was tall and upright, with a beaky nose and a face that was full of anticipation. She was narrow, with no hips or breasts, so that her cotton dress was like a pillowcase for her body, with a belt around the middle. Aunt Em put her arms around Emma briefly and Emma felt how thin she was, but strong. The whisker Beth had told her about pricked Emma on the cheek but she hardly felt it, so overwhelmed was she by her surprising and sudden arrival after the long hours of rattling along a track. ‘It's so lovely to see you, dear,' said Aunt Em. She blinked quickly, before turning away.

She had been brought to the station by a neighbour, a young woman named Flora, who had the longest hair Emma had ever seen, and the shortest miniskirt, and the nicest legs. Emma, who loved sketching, felt that she could draw Flora's legs then and there. But then she was bustled out to Flora's little Austin, where she met Flora's eight-year-old daughter Stella, who sucked her thumb and looked with frank curiosity when Emma crawled into the back seat beside her.

Emma took in everything, staring intently from the window of the car: the winding road with camphor laurel trees pressing in from both sides, the paddocks full of scotch thistles and lantana and cattle, the outcrops of bananas on the hills. There was a sense of things growing headlong in the heat and the wet. And she was watching for the house, to see if it was as Beth had said.

It was. She recognised it from Beth's description even before they turned in the drive. It was set back in a paddock with hills behind it and a creek winding down one side: large, two-storeyed, with rusty iron lace on the upstairs verandah and peeling paint on the timber walls.

From the front door you could see right through the house, down the long shadowy hallway to the back, where there was a concrete path and a rusty water tank illuminated by sunlight. Halfway up the hall was a staircase leading to the upper floor. It was all as Beth had described.

Emma closed her eyes. She wanted the experience of being here to be hers, not a second-hand version of Beth's. The trouble with being the younger sister was that you were never the first to do anything.

Emma opened her eyes and saw Aunt Em looking at her, as quizzical as a finch. ‘Are you all right, dear?'

‘Oh, Aunt Em . . .' she said. The newness of it all was almost too much for her.

‘Just call me Em,' said her aunt, kindly.

Flora came inside with Emma's bag. ‘There you go!' she said, setting it down in the hallway.

‘Thank you so much, my dear.' Em managed to look both grateful and taken aback. Emma was to grow used to her look of perpetual surprise; all those years of being alive hadn't lessened one scrap her astonishment at the world.

‘My pleasure,' said Flora. She put her hands out in a broad gesture of uselessness and shrugged. ‘Well, I'll leave you to it.' She clattered out through the front door, trailed after by Stella, who'd only just finished trailing inside, and who gave Emma a lively backward glance as she departed.

The house smelt of lamb fat, and wood smoke, and lavender perfume. The bedroom Emma was to stay in was sparse and clean. It had double doors leading onto a verandah with ancient, splintered boards. There were fresh flowers on a chest of drawers, and a new bedspread. Aunt Em had taken trouble with it. But it was strange, and empty.

Emma had brought her drawing things with her, and Patrick White's Voss, which she had imagined reading on long lonely nights in the old house in the country. She'd thrown in a copy of
Das
Kdpital for good measure. Emma was an ambitious reader. She unpacked them, along with her small black transistor radio with its earplug. She hoped the radio would have reception. She thought of Aunt Em's place as the end of the earth.

Her meagre things made no dent in the strangeness. Her clothes were swallowed by capacious drawers that had been lined with fresh newspaper, and her copies of Voss and
Das
Kapital merely looked as if someone had abandoned them on the night table. Emma went to the verandah door and laid her cheek against the timber doorjamb, listening for the tick of a heartbeat. She felt that such an old house must have a pulse. She rummaged in her bag and found an apple left over from the trip, and she lay on the bed and devoured it, a last link with home.

Out in the hallway, she followed the sunlight till she was outside, and was startled by two pigeons taking off from on top of the water tank next to the door. The sound of their wings was like the squeak of someone running across dry sand. Yin-yin, yin-yin, sang the cicadas; their song throbbed inside her head. Emma sighed with satisfaction. Beth had said nothing about all this. The place was hers now.

Em was in the lutchen makrng tea. It was a gloriously dim, damp-feeling room at the back of the house. Emma peered from the narrow window There were clumps of lilies growing outside in dark, damp soil. It was so shaded beside the house that no grass grew there. A thrill of attraction and fear had begun in Emma's heart for this place. It was both strange and familiar; it had been waiting for her all along.

Emma pictured herself within this kitchen, within this house, within this damp, luxuriant landscape, and recounted to herself the journey which had taken her further and further from her old life. This was a house of shadows, of dark and light: dark inside, with squares of light where the doors and windows were. The floor of the kitchen and hallway were dark and light too, a chequerboard of tiles. It was a place that she felt she had dreamed about and forgotten.

At a table with a lino top she sat and drank Em's strong, sour tea. Em said, ‘Well, my dear. How is your mother? And Beth?' She blinked as she said it, surprising herself again.

‘They're well,' said Emma, stirring more sugar into her tea. ‘They send their love.' This was true, but sounded as if she'd just made it up, from politeness. Her mother had sent presents, too: a flannelette nightie and a set of face washers, but Emma was shy of presenting them to Aunt Em and had left them in her bag.

‘I'm so pleased you could come,' said Em. She smiled and squinted; she seemed to have trouble with her eyes, for they watered at the slightest thing. ‘It's lovely to see Sam's children again. You were such a tiny thing when he brought you here.'

Emma had long had a memory of arriving in a big house in the dead of night. It must have been her father's arms then, that had cradled her in the walk down a long hallway, and up the stairs to bed.

Em peeled a freckled pear and cut it into slices, offering a piece to Emma. It was cold and delicious; the juice ran down Emma's arm and she wiped it away. Em ate the pear elegantly, slicing pieces from it until all that was left was a moist, square core. ‘I hope you'll find enough to do,' said Em. ‘There's Flora, of course, who lives practically next door. She'll be company for you.' Her voice was high and strange, an old lady's voice.

‘I'm sure I'll find enough to do,' Emma told her, smiling down at the table. She heard her own voice, smug and fat with youth. ‘I've brought some books, and my drawing things. Anyway, I enjoy a bit of solitude.' She pursed her lips and heard how dreadfully, falsely, grown-up she sounded.

‘Your mother said you were interested in drawing. What do you like to draw?' Without waiting for an answer she added, ‘You look awfully thin, dear, I think I'll make some toast.' Em got up and stoked the embers of the wood fire into life and cut two thick slices of bread from a white loaf.

‘Oh, I draw anything,' Emma told her. ‘People, mostly. I'd like to draw you,' she said recklessly, and Em laughed, delighted. ‘I'm no oil painting,' she said.

The toast was deliciously charred. Emma ate it and smiled at Em, who smiled back. Emma observed frankly her aunt's fine, long face and blue eyes. Her white hair was piled untidily on top of her head. They sat there eating toast and smiling and emanating goodwill for some time.