The Bad Sister (32 page)

On the upper landing, where Uncle Ralph resisted the equinoctial changes brought by his sister by cowering in his room and refusing to come out to see the flying leaves and rich stuffs spread over the banisters, they turned to bats like little flying rats, with velvety grey capes on their backs. While my father rushed after them, and the broom swirled over his head, they flew at high speed into the pictures my mother had banished up there: the huge, awkward painting of Aunt Zita as a child, with black ringlets and unfinished hands, and her father and her aunts in the background – and the interiors of cathedrals in bright unfaded paint, and the banks of dull rivers the colour of mustard. The bats made no sound, but some of them dived into the pictures and disappeared. In the morning, when my father hunted for them again with brush and pan, they could be seen in the corners of the paintings – leaves like scraps of torn cloth on the floor of Aunt Zita's feet, aisles and pews of the cathedrals choked with them, as if the roof had blown off and they had settled in the ruin. Uncle Ralph, on his way over the hard green cord carpet to the bathroom, refused to look to left or right. My father, although he was so anxious to catch the leaves, never saw the ones that had been caught between frame and glass. By the end of the autumn they had always melted away. But for days after Aunt Zita came, the bodies of bats were found in the garden, or on the tiled floors down by the kitchen. My mother refused to acknowledge them. By then their capes were faded and torn, and most of the autumnal brilliance had gone. They were buried by my father, in the rubbish heap down by the chicken-run.

The nights of hunting for the leaves were the worst for Aunt Zita because she couldn't get away to the ball. If my father had seen her he would have stopped her from going. Yet when we did go, for the first time at least, there was something so formal, and so expected, about the whole thing that I never enjoyed myself. I thought of the valley we
had left, and the forest of old trees on the side of the hill facing the house, where I had seen my mother watch Aunt Zita as she went through some of her transformations in the grassy clearing near the top of the wood. My mother had looked sulky and resigned, as if promising herself she would never let Aunt Zita's tricks impress her. Most of the time she walked alone, on a path of new leaves the sudden wind had torn from the trees, and Aunt Zita flapped among the branches over her head, as a blue jay or a kingfisher. Sometimes a fox darted across my mother's path. Then occasionally Aunt Zita would turn up again, in the old fur her mother had left in the box-room on the upper landing, and they would walk together as if nothing had happened. Aunt Zita had gone off probably to look for a rare plant among the birches. My mother carried a stick on these walks. She might have thought that Aunt Zita would come at her in the shape of a bear, or that a tree would crash against her path just one second away from killing her. My father was never told about these disappearances, and the tame birds and hares with wide eyes which replaced Aunt Zita on the conventional walks about his land. He would have laughed. My mother kept her lips pursed, and always came back with a scarf-ful of bright red and white spotted mushrooms, and chunks of yellow fungus that had been lying like a second leg along the trunk of a tree.

We were never back from the ball until dawn. It took so long to leave the mountains and fly through the mist to the kingdom where Aunt Zita was perpetually served by smiling footmen. In this other time, which seemed to float beside the one my mother and father lived, we might have arrived in any country. Aunt Zita said from time to time that we were in Portugal, or France, or a French Caribbean island like Guadeloupe. The temperature never affected us. And the house where the ball was given was always the same: a grey stone building, classical, with pillars and a portico and flares of fire in bronze torches which we could see miles beneath us before we came down. In the gardens were follies and the ruins of temples and a wild glade where
Aunt Zita could summon up the fire spirits if she felt in the mood. The music was very polite and formal, too – and Aunt Zita never went to the glade on the first night, so we danced with the courtiers who had come in our train, and stood in front of tall, ornate mirrors which threw our faces back at us, and we yawned behind our fans. Aunt Zita was interested in seeing if any new games of power had taken place since last autumn. Sometimes an eldest son had been killed in a duel, or a wife had eloped with a lover and a whole estate gone to ruin, but they seemed unchanging to me, so it was a mystery that I looked forward to the first ball so much, and even expected something new to happen at it.

On the days after our evening flights it was my mother who looked pale and haggard, as if she had poisoned herself with thoughts about us. In the middle of her cheeks were pinpoints of scarlet and a dank breath came out of her. She was as viciously and unexpectedly coloured as the red-and-white mushrooms she gathered under the birches. In her fury at Aunt Zita's freedom, at the transformed landscape, hills like the chins of malign gods, plants grouped in sympathies, hedges of Elizabethan box which had sprung up around them, sunken gardens and brick paths laid out in a forgotten set of cabbalistic twists and turns – in hatred at the herbs, the silver-grey of the rosemary, which went from grey to green and back to silver as soft and bright as the head of a moth, all with the speed of the shifting shutters of memory – in rage at the samphire, the comfrey, the roses that had been made like painted faces – my mother produced all the confinements and refinements of her own restricted age. Even before breakfast, while Aunt Zita still lay in bed resting, and the endless crackle and rustle, like the sound of distant fire, came down to us from her ghostly maids, things were rearranged in the house and traps were set. My father sat with his tea in the study on such days. He knew, probably, that he would have to come out with a thunderbolt and disperse the whole house and the valley, smash them to smithereens, before my mother and Aunt
Zita would fall quiet. But he had no energy for the scene, of course, and no desire to upset his sister. He must have thought, as he watched the first cold rain of the end of the year go past his study window, that he had had enough of his family. Yet his family – now that my mother's frail hold on his house was gone – was just what she insisted on giving him. He became agitated, and went in and out of the study too often, so that the door seemed to snap open and shut behind him like a steel spring.

My father's mother was there, and all the daughters too, and by the time Aunt Zita was halfway down the stairs there was a great ceremony in the hall. My mother had clothed the legs of a piano in frilled knickerbockers. There were bouquets of white flowers, sickeningly sweet in smell, mementoes of the calm days of the long summer, before the grass turned yellow, days when the small stone houses in the village each had a door open on to the back garden and women pushed aside washing to walk to the food van, or the travelling library from the town. There was a font at the end of the hall – and the hall had grown even taller, and had sucked in its windows to a religious shape, giving the whole area the appearance of a Victorian church; and there was a minister holding a child, in robes as stiff and papery-white as the scented flowers. Was the child already dead? Its head fell back too softly. Or was it Aunt Zita, in this complicated game my mother was playing with her sister-in-law? Was she showing my father the birth of the bone of contention between them?

On these occasions my father's mother never saw me, nor did her consumptive daughters, and I felt that from the grave their disapproval washed over my mother and myself, as if something was the matter with our bones, some sinew lacking which made our faces and our jaws misshapen. They all, like Aunt Zita, had brows of marble, noses drawn at a school of Fine Art, necks and shoulders so perfectly balanced to their heads that seeing them stand together was to find oneself caught in a colonnade. Our blood was weaker than theirs, diluted: and it was possible to believe
that my father had had no connection with us at all, but had been bound a long time, always faithful, in an Egyptian alliance with his sister. Even at these family gatherings, where he darted in and out of his study before my mother caught him and held him firm in place, he seemed to belong absolutely with them, and to be of another species from my mother and myself. His family looked balefully at my mother – she was brave to perform in this way, but her desire for revenge was stronger than caution – and in the shafts of light the colour of dark gold that came in through the stained glass there were glances which fluttered away from the sight of us, the miscegenation, the
mariage mor-
ganatique
, the links that would be the first to break in the chain.

Aunt Zita was certainly disturbed by having her family handed to her like this. The horrible limitations of her childhood returned to her, and she squirmed on the hard bench, narrow as a coffin lid, under the family coat of arms. Her eyes turned to the window, but the hills and the wind lashing at the larches, the wind that would always carry her away from us, were obscured by the rich, false colours of piety. Aunt Maddie and Aunt Lucy's faces were in the window, yellow curls and white faces, chaste, swooning in suppressed desire in the mock medieval castle of their dragon father. Chinks of blue glass made their eyes. They were as enclosed as Aunt Zita now, but envying her journeys to the end of the earth they looked at her without love or understanding.

My mother enjoyed these scenes almost too much. She made me sit with her, at the front of the church and in full view of the family pew, and she turned constantly to watch the expression of suffering on Aunt Zita's face. Some of the village people sat next to us – not Peg, who would never go inside a church, nor Maurice, who scuffed his heels outside until I came to play with him – but Willie, who worked on the farm, and his wife Minnie. Willie's hands were broad and rough, and covered his face entirely when he prayed. Minnie had a smell of apples. They were better to look at
than my father's family, who, having put out Aunt Zita's fire, by now were stiff and identical, like a set of plaster casts of classical statues left for some malicious purpose in a church. Willie's legs were bowed from sitting on a tractor. Minnie, who dusted in the house each week, competing at this time of year with Aunt Zita's maids but normally quiet, slightly humming as she went around the rooms, was thin, with grey hair in a bun – and she seemed, sitting there under the eyes of the minister, to have felt she must rejoice or sorrow at every one of my father's family occasions.

I recognized that it was my father's brother who was being baptized. This was one of my mother's cruellest punishments, and I saw she didn't dare turn to look at my father as the ceremony went on. Only despair at Aunt Zita's power, and the unfamiliar house which had arranged itself to suit Aunt Zita and my father, with cupboards suddenly locked and refusing to open to my mother's key, and concealed rooms in the highest turrets where their childish laughter shrieked and moaned all day in the wind – and my mother chasing upstairs after them, to find bedrooms empty and cold and smelling of mothballs when only a moment before she had heard them scuffling in there … and Uncle Ralph's silence, in the room under the boar's head, with the black bristle of its crown going white in a parting, like the Beast who suffered so long for Beauty … all this had driven her to perform the most powerful of her tricks. It was also a declaration of enmity. The whole family had to be present, and the colours had to be strong in the church – a late-summer sun outside coming in through the crowned saints and the blood of the Lord and falling in ruby tears on the faces of my father's family. Blue stones danced across the cheeks of his dying aunts, who appeared, in the tall pew that was also shot with scudding colour, ridiculous and pathetic, like mummers in an ancient play. The tragedy of the family was being re-enacted before their eyes. I wondered how my mother had the strength to do it – she must have studied the subject, in all the long afternoons when Aunt Zita and my father had gone to visit the farm, or
walked over the hills without her. She had come across the faded photographs perhaps, of the baby in white lace, and the little boy on his mother's knee, maternal eyes flashing and the child too securely anchored, so that his first flight from her would inevitably end in death. She had gone, when she was abandoned in the house, and even the summer had gone, rain as thin and green as the paint in the old rooms falling drearily at the windows – and Uncle Ralph pacing beside his machines or closed in some cupboard, hanging like a great bat upside down in the darkness, proving a new biological clock – she had been led to the small room by the disused nurseries, where a Victorian bath was boxed in by the wall and a picture of my father's brother's earliest club was hanging from a pin. She must have stared a long time at the six sitters, in their boaters and striped ties. My father's brother, at that point, had two months to live. Above him and his friends a tall skylight went up in the bathroom ceiling and far from reaching the sky was extinguished in an attic, so that the light which came down from above was dark green and filtered, and the forgotten shrine seemed to have been submerged in water. My father's mother would never have allowed such a relic to end up there. It must have been Aunt Zita, who was afraid to see the face of her long-dead brother, who had hung it up, casually knocking in a pin. I don't think my father ever noticed it. But my mother would go suddenly to that part of the house, where the children had been brought up – it was the only part of the house Aunt Zita didn't change – and come back refreshed.

The minister named the child. My father's family still sat like the dead in the back pew. It was strange the baby's mother didn't hold him, and that there were no godparents, but the ritual my mother was forcing them to witness was gone through like this to underline the child's doom, its death before its twentieth year: to show them how unhappy they would feel when he had gone: to remind my father and Aunt Zita how different their lives would have been if he had lived.