The Bad Sister (34 page)

Aunt Zita would stare up at the Madonna in her blue and yellow robes. The Virgin was patting a lamb, which had a green china bow at its neck. The Virgin's face appeared sad, absorbed – and below her, on the mantelpiece, seized by Aunt Zita's eyes, was the photograph of my mother's sister, Aunt Thelma, who was responsible for the scene above. I didn't know how my mother had managed to introduce the photograph, and then permit her sister to put up the pastoral of the Mother of God. Neither belonged to this room, where my father and his brothers and Aunt Zita had been brought up: it was like forcing the offspring of a different animal, in order to deceive the mother, into the true skin.

Aunt Zita was never deceived. She looked into Aunt Thelma's narrow, pious face and then up again at the oval plaque. It grew even darker in the room and she began to sway on her feet. I could feel her desire, but as it was unknown to me I thought instead that I heard the first stirrings of the north wind struggling in the thick centres of the yews, trying to reach the window, to blow away the branches. The soot went down in a steady stream into the grate. Aunt Zita's elder brother stood between the windows, dressed in a flannel blazer and white bags. A pigeon, demoted from its perch by the intrusion of his shoulder, seemed to be standing by his left ear. The bright yew berries on the wallpaper, with their little dabs of white to show transparency, hung from his hair in clusters. An unpleasant whiteness came into the room, like the white light before a storm, and the ceramic lamb gleamed on the wall. Aunt Zita walked towards her elder brother, pulling off her clothes as she went.

Aunt Zita lay on the floor. She was naked, and her skin was white and shining as the lamb that pranced endlessly above her. She opened her legs and began to roll from side to side. I felt Aunt Thelma's silent anger, and a tension that would bring either thunder or the cracking of the Madonna's complacent face, the shattering into power of the blue and yellow robes. Aunt Zita's elder brother
stepped forward. The pigeon and the berries receded from him. He knelt between Aunt Zita's gaping thighs.

Aunt Zita's elder brother had an intelligent, well-meaning face. Before his death he had played the piano in the long room downstairs which my mother had closed and which my father still secretly longed for. There had been parties, and concerts: Aunt Zita's elder brother had been loved by many people. He had owned one of the first small planes (this now belonged to Uncle Ralph) and he had floated above the rim of his land. Once he had crashed into the lake. His friends liked to dress him as an Arab, in those times, and to put him at the head of the table in golden robes and beads. They travelled with him into the desert, on his quests for reassurance, self-abnegation and power. Aunt Zita's elder brother and his friends liked to make up clubs amongst themselves, and to speak in secret languages. The young women they worshipped were as distant as flowers embroidered on a kimono sleeve. If these young women lost their enigmatic quality they were no longer interesting. But with Aunt Zita it was different. She provoked her elder brother's friends. They were ashamed of themselves for falling in love with her so lustily – yet Aunt Zita loved only her elder brother in the end.

The fire rolled out of Aunt Zita in a ball. It lit up her elder brother's face so that it glowed like the yew berries on the wall behind him, and the yew berries on the branches outside, which were beginning to toss as the fat trees swelled with the wind. His face was white, and glowed under the skin pale red. The small globe of fire, flickering and restless, slid across the floor and lay by the fender, beneath the empty grate. Aunt Zita and her elder brother rocked on the threadbare carpet, which had once carried the same design as the walls and where, rubbed out by the passage of Aunt Zita and her brothers' childish feet, there remained the shadows of pigeons and the lost key of interlocking branches. Aunt Thelma and the Madonna looked down on them. In the corridors, the women of earlier centuries shifted and creaked in their silk dresses
and pinioned hats. It had grown so dark that it was clear there would be a storm. I thought of my mother and the rain hissing on the damp wood my father and Uncle Ralph had collected, and her apprehensions growing as they went to huddle in the boathouse by the edge of the lake where one room was for human habitation and the other, with a floor of black water, guarded the boat like a monster from the deep.

The fire diminished and went out. It left a pool on the carpet, like an inkspot. It seemed thick, and didn't creep towards Aunt Zita and her elder brother, who now lay without moving in each other's arms.

The rain came, as it always did, from the extreme end of the valley where my mother and father and Uncle Ralph were trying to have their picnic. It was as if the sky had gone down into the cracks in the ravine and the clouds were spewing the rain out from the earth behind the shallow stones. I watched the drops that raced across the window turn to an open fan of water. Aunt Zita slept on. The look of intense joy and suffering had left her face, and she seemed obliterated, as if her elder brother had given her the punishment she craved. Certainly, his sleeping face was self-satisfied, in the faint white glow that came in from the sky.

I met my mother in the hall as she walked in after the abortive picnic. The straw hat and scarf were wet, and her eyes were anxious.

‘The weather's broken,' Uncle Ralph said as he came in behind her with the fishing satchel they had packed with food. ‘That's the end of the summer, I'm afraid.'

My father closed the hall door. He hummed as he went to his study. He welcomed, I knew, the first storms of winter and the gale-force wind.

On the day before the return to school, the wind slipped back down the chimneys and howled, and the trees began to toss off their leaves so that the grassy path was cluttered with them, and a man in a van came to the house, bringing us trays for inspection: hairpins in packets, brown dog
combs, bundles of liquorice allsorts. The trays were partitioned, into wooden lanes that felt sticky at the top. But Aunt Zita liked running her finger down them. She liked the cheap jewellery, and bought a red butterfly with smudged markings. It winked at us from her lapel for the rest of the day.

The growing wind wasn't the only cause for my mother's unease. Since her triumphant afternoon alone in the house, Aunt Zita had produced an effect of stasis, of absolute limbo, where the house seemed destined to waver constantly between the present and the hours of Aunt Zita's youth, in the shadows of autumn lengthening and shortening rooms, bringing down folds of thick curtains, grouping chairs round long-vanished card tables. Electricity, a new invention, flickered blue at the touch of a switch. My father complained of the fast rains and falling leaves blocking the dynamo. He took us all down with him, to the patch of unreclaimed land by the chicken-run. We looked in at the machine that converted the water that swept needlessly from the hills into the valley, and made our dim lights and electric fires. Against its roar came the wind, which rolled over the turrets of the house. The wind gathered in indigo balls of power above the dynamo. I saw Aunt Zita and my father exchange glances, and I knew they no longer knew if they had left childhood. The wind rumbled and collected forces over the dynamo roof. The flimsy glass and asphalt roof looked as if it could be lifted and carried on a single breath over the too-fast-running stream and into the field beyond. Then the machine, turning and thundering, the great engine that kept the house and the valley alight and stationary while the black clouds rolled past, would finally test its strength against the wind, Aunt Zita's harnessed element. The dynamo would grind to a halt, the slowing spokes a grin of defeat. The wind, gathering its huge, ungainly bustle, would make off across the skies with Aunt Zita perched astride the billowing night clouds. My father and mother would run for Willie to mend the machine before it got too dark to see.

‘We need two men from the farm to clear the Hen Pond and then the sluice down here,' said my father.

Uncle Ralph said he would like to clear the Hen Pond. When he had been a child, the pond – above the farm, along a trail on the side of the mountain – had been one day completely emptied. Uncle Ralph remembered the gasping fish, with white bellies that looked as if they were paunches hanging over trousers, and mouths that moved mechanically up and down in search of air, like his own clockwork dolls. There was a surprising amount of litter in the pondweed: old tin boxes, John Player packets, women's bath hats. Uncle Ralph had walked among the dying fish, noting the species. They were all brown trout except for one pike, and he was forced to invent. But he had the list still, the beginnings of his ‘museum of possibilities', where speech parts and the vertebrae of prehistoric birds, and unusual collector's pieces, such as the hair of a witch burned by Matthew Hopkins, were laid out and labelled next to his mah-jong set made up of swordfish teeth, and all the other treasures my father unwillingly allowed him to keep in the house. But my father pointed out that the pond would not be dredged today. Only the leaves must be squeezed from the sluice, if the dynamo was to receive the water it needed. Uncle Ralph shook his head, and immediately said he was busy. He wanted no more of leaves, since Aunt Zita's first autumnal shaking of the trees. He had hated the invasion of the bats after the blowing-in of the leaves – and he hated birds, too, which made him distraught when he was down by the chicken-run and heard the chickens whirring up their wings in an attempt to fly. Most of all he feared Aunt Zita's hats, with their monstrous feathers. Sometimes, as she walked up the spiral staircase, intentionally slow, towards his room, a black cockerel, wings at the flap, beak wide open as two fingers in shadow play on the wall, appeared to be craning from her head. Uncle Ralph slammed his door then, and stayed by his classified lists until she was gone.

With the first storms came the first feelings of rebellion, and the village was drawn in tight to itself, the stones on the square grey houses clearly demarcated, as if a child had gone over them in the night with a white pencil, underlining the separateness of each granite slab. The rain poured down, not horizontally but from low clouds always opening and always full. Dark came in now like an unexpected blow before the beginning of a fight, knocking the looming house, and the village and greenhouses above, the chicken-run below and the school half-escaping out of the valley, into an obscurity that wasn't even relieved by stars. And the wind, enormous in the lightness of its time, and refreshed by its rest in the wings while the unimportant scenes were being played, seized and tussled with the gaping clouds, banged them against each other until they groaned, dived through them in eddies which danced the tiles from the roof of the farm buildings, and sent splinters of pure cold along the corridors, reminding Aunt Zita to get her ball-dress ready and her jewels out from their box.

This time, though Aunt Zita couldn't feel it, the resentment was there and growing. In Peg's shop the new issue of stamps had come in, and the people from the village met on the neutrality of her linoleum floor to buy the orange 2/6d booklet and raise their eyes to the heavens at the coming of the wind. They were looking for someone to blame. From Peg's door, which had a glass window as the upper half, they could see the scudding clouds that had already devoured two thirds of the world, for the mountains were gone and even the banks of rhododendron planted between the big house and the village were touched with mist at the top. They saw, too, and were afraid of them before custom blunted the fear, the narrowing months ahead. Peg's cats, eyes already dreamy with winter, perched on the ledge above the counter. The smell of the cats, and their saucer of milk on the floor by the cartons of chocolate bars, and the uneven heat from Peg's electric fire, which, depending on the leaves in the sluice in the Hen Pond, and the power of the wind as it choked the burns with leaves and silenced the
dynamo, was either suffocatingly hot as or pale as the stripes on the ginger cats – all these reminded people of their own interiors, and themselves prone in them as prisoners while winter settled in over the hills. They took money for the stamps from their purses and pockets with fingers that ached already with the coming chilblains. Minnie's rough fingers were sore and red. The cola bottles, and the ginger beer, which people took to the hay-fields and lay sipping in the miraculous, white calm of the long northern summer evenings, were stacked now in the back of the shop. Times were still transitional: the tins of cocoa hadn't yet arrived in the delivery van. But Peg was in her shawl. Flies no longer buzzed in the shop. As the customers went out into the raging air, they shook their heads menacingly.

In the school the teacher was bad-tempered. I sat with Maurice, but our pact of the summer, of the magical old man in the chicken-house, had been blown away by the winds and he sat half-turned from me, as indifferent as Peg's cats, frozen with the boredom of the term that lay ahead. Outside the school the wind fussed in the dark firs the teacher wanted my father to cut down, and blew into the bushes as if they were paper bags. The teacher had been out of the valley for her holidays. She was strained, the pincer grip of the valley had her once more and the prospect of the lonely winter ahead in the dark shapes of the tossing trees. She punished us for our disobedience and lack of concern by strapping the palms of our hands with a crescent of leather. She looked none of us in the eye as she did this. Yet in the early summer, invited by my mother up for tea at the house, she had made three perfect somersaults – presumably for my instruction – on the circle of grass by the front door.

The map of the world on the wall in the school seemed to have grown even smaller since I had seen Aunt Zita again, and travelled great distances. The large pink continent which was South America suggested that it was on those fat folds – the map had fallen from its drawing-pin so often
that the western side of the world was crumpled and dragged up – that I had flown and landed. I thought I could feel the sweet air, and see mournful ruins where Aunt Zita erected her colonial mansion for a night of insolent revelry before going out into the mysterious cities of the Aztecs and making fire in the dawn, as they had done. Islands, no bigger than blobs, lay off the northern coast of the great continent, and I smelt their nutmeg yawn. I knew that tonight, or one night soon, as the wind built its strength and Aunt Zita's blue, fiery lips smiled in greater and greater disdain at my mother, at the dining-room table, at Uncle Ralph's craven absence, we would leave again – and, ‘the first ball of the season' over, we would come down in real carnival, in the dream of any dweller in those lonely mountains by the silent lochs.