The Bad Sister (35 page)

The teacher called me away from the map. Perhaps she hated the tea stain above it, symbol of a too-restricted life, a domestic squabble hung above the picture of the world. Or perhaps, building her resentment as the others in the village were, she guessed my knowledge of moving through space while they were anchored, and had decided, as Aunt Zita was unavailable to her, to make the most of me as a scapegoat.

In those early days of the rising wind, I walked from school to the house along the back road. The rain had driven deep into the road already, and made puddles Maurice walked through like a giant crossing small seas. The trees were straining to come up by the roots and sail through the air. By the Racket Court, where some of Aunt Zita's old clothes, red velvet dresses and capes, lay in trunks, there was a protective belt of trees. Maurice always ran past them quickly. In the wind they were black and moaning, and their branches rattled. In these days of the rising intolerance of the wind, and the sharp rebellion of the people in the village, one of the trees that guarded the old, discarded treasures of my father and Aunt Zita's family had been wrenched from the earth and failed to fly. The earth in the
wound was surprisingly fresh and brown. The tree lay half across the road, with branches of broken fir rising in semicircles from the trunk, like a crushed centipede. The first day, Maurice tried to jump over it, and the dying, prickly branches pulled feebly at the bare legs. Then we walked the long way round, over the craters in the road and clinging to the fence.

It was a long time since the Racket Court had been used. It looked like a fairly imposing-sized house, Swiss perhaps, because it was built of wood and had a cheerful red roof, which had faded in two world wars and the piling years of the century, and had grown a covering of dark green moss, thick as a slipping wig over the tiles. Apart from the black trees by the entrance, it was easy to get in. Many of the children from the village climbed in the broken windows and ran up to the gallery, where once my father's mother had watched her handsome son play indoor tennis with nameless young women from London. The children of thirty years ago, before leaving the valley, going to the mills or south in search of jobs, had prised open the trunks and played in the old clothes. Sets of ivory-backed brushes with Aunt Zita's elder brother's initials half chipped off, and the yellowing bristles too few and soft to brush a head, lay in corners of the Racket Court, as if the children had tried to invent some game in which they could be the pieces.

The velvet of Aunt Zita's red cape was bruised with age and fancy dress games. While the children played grandmother and the wolf, their parents searched for them and dragged them from the forbidden Racket Court. The property of ghosts, it still wasn't theirs to play in. Dead or alive, my father and Aunt Zita's family owned every branch of every tree, every corner and cupboard in the valley and circling hills.

Once, Uncle Ralph had kept his Percival Gull Six in the Racket Court, and it was possibly because of this that Aunt Zita seldom went down the back road – and if she did, with my mother on the pretext of visiting the two cottages below the school, she never materialized her family there. Aunt
Zita, with her own powers to carry her through the air, hated any form of aviation. Uncle Ralph's excitement with goggles and helmet, his slight guilt at being the inheritor from a fallen god of this wonderful machine, and the paraphernalia of string and paper and engine made Aunt Zita's eyes roll with boredom in her head. Even though the Percival Gull was now housed in the stables (another sign of Uncle Ralph's permanence and therefore not mentioned), Aunt Zita walked past the Racket Court as if it had never been built.

On the evening I suspected I would go on the second of my trips with Aunt Zita, Maurice showed me the extent of the growing rage and obstinacy in the village. Because the wind had been hard behind him, prodding him with a thick knuckle and almost knocking him flat as we left the huddles of black trees in the back road and came out by Peg's shop, he turned and dived down the path to the chicken-run. I ran with him. The evening light was sour, and the hen-house and scrappy yard looked desolate in their huddle of corrugated iron roof and dusty glass of the dynamo building squatting to the side of them, all bordered by an overfull burn which went down the side of the garden with a choking sound, and made the grass soggy and treacherous. Maurice picked two reeds that were growing by the side of the burn. He had a small sling. Sometimes we shot the reeds, whittled into arrows, at the old man in the chicken-house. The hens screeched when the reeds went inside the warm, dark house. We were afraid for our eyes as we crawled up the slatted run to see if we had shot the old man, and the hens' beaks and wings came in round us. We slipped on the slatted run spattered with chicken shit, and rolled on the wet grass before we went home, to soak out the stains.

This time, Maurice picked the reeds as before, but he turned his back on the chicken-house and he refused to search for the human turd. He made me walk across the burn, on two logs that rocked a few inches above the brown spate. On the far side, we climbed up through the stiff reeds
to the top of the bank. We looked back a moment to get our breath. A half-evening masked the buttresses and crenellations of the house. The light in my father's study was on. In the long drawing-room, which my mother had many years ago condemned to nothingness, two chandeliers shone like sparklers. It was almost possible to see the portraits on the walls – tall women dressed in fading, inferior paint – and the dull parquet. I knew then that Aunt Zita must be preparing herself in the unused room, making the trappings of a ball so that our departure later would go smoothly. I couldn't see her though: only the torch-light flickerings on the upper landing of her returning maids, and the top of my father's head at the desk in his study – squarer than the head of the old man in the chicken-house, but with hair of much the same colour, like the black and white mixed feathers of hens.

Maurice was making me look the other way, away from the house. Behind us, growing up from the compost heap, was his army of willow-herb, which seemed to stretch towards him as he stood on the crest of the bank. Before us lay the fields, and an ornamental pond where Uncle Ralph sometimes practised his new diving equipment, in a depth of four feet, and the bumpy wood which grew over the buried eighth-century village. It was as if the two villages, the old with its position near the entrance to the valley, its strategic height on the mid-slope of a hill – and the new, built by my father's grandfather, were diametrically opposed to each other, in space, in time, in attitudes of dependence and isolation. It was from this buried village, though, that people were walking. From the trees, and mounds of brick that had sunk in a millennium into the leaf mould, and from the skeleton houses, thick with earth, walls strangled by the probing roots of old trees, the people of the village advanced on the house.

Maurice told me to run home. I left him – he didn't hear as I slipped in the burn from the wet logs and fought the brown current to the other bank, nor did he answer when I called to him to come and help me. I went up the garden to
the house. I had seen Willie and Minnie in the crowd of advancing villagers, and Minnie's sister Mary who sometimes came to stay, and teased my dog until it bit her. Also Peg, very small and straight in the front row. They could have been armed, but only primitively, like Maurice, and in the dusk it was difficult to see.

Outside the long gallery, where I could see Aunt Zita dancing alone in a fizzle of lights of her own making, the wind slunk, rushed round corners, puffed up at the unnecessary turrets and unfireable stone guns. I went in at one of the garden doors, and immediately saw my mother, as she tramped the long tiled corridor back from a conversation in the kitchen. She was frowning, her face was pale. No doubt, while I had been at school, her day had gone badly with Aunt Zita. And as I was about to warn her of the approaching mob in the fields, I fell silent and went upstairs to get ready for the night.

In the basement, in the long, tiled passages, the white tiles on the walls grew sometimes enormous and sometimes tiny, and in their continuous modulation they shifted like the notes on a piano, silently playing a symphony of rising and falling scales. The red tiles on the floor were dull, however often they were mopped down. Along the tops of the walls were the bells, with the names of the distant superior rooms inscribed beneath them. On excited nights, when the wind was arched under Aunt Zita's window, and the highest floor of the house whispered and giggled, and let off the sound of tiptoeing feet like pistol shots, the bells rang uncertainly in the basement, trilling and then muffled. Aunt Zita pulled at the faded bell-rope in her room when she wanted to summon her maids. The ancient wires carried her message through the interstices of the house, pulsing for a millionth of a second behind the panels of my mother's bedroom, falling from the head of the house to the door of my father's study, so that he looked up vaguely from his desk and peered around, sensing his sister's imperious electricity. When the bells rang, the ghostly
maids appeared immediately, as if they had travelled upward through the cumbersome house, along the wires that called them. Aunt Zita would smile, and indicate a dress that needed to be taken from the cupboard. Another maid would take a shoe tree from a black shoe with black ribbons that tied over the instep. Precariously high in the house, they walked lightly in their servants' creaking shoes in front of low windows, while in the basement the bells still shook restlessly from the tugging.

The names of the bells, which were colours and flowers: Heliotrope and Blue, Lavender and Lavender Dressing Room, Miss Zita, Master Ralph, Governess's Room and Campanula, appeared as mysterious announcements on the tiles below. For small wants, for hot water in hip baths taken to the bedrooms, breakfast trays, and for washing still smelling of the steam iron carried in the gloom of the back stairs to the narrow bachelor rooms where friends of my father's elder brother pulled on fresh linen, sweated on the Racket Court and pulled it off again – for these domestic, daily needs the flowery bells rang incessantly. But for trouble, the great bell above the stables sounded out as far as the village, and down as far as the school. A theft in the house might wake its voice, or fire, or a bulletin of war that had just come through the air to make itself heard on the wireless. The sound of the great bell became trapped in the valley, and as the valley contracted in the last mile before falling into a dip of water under the ravine, it hurled itself over the hills and made a dark sound, as thick as a larch wood glimpsed through mist, before it disappeared again. It was seldom used. Yet, on the night when the villagers had been seen at dusk, walking from the village they had never inhabited, it began to ring loudly just as dinner was being served. There were several reasons for this – yet both my father and mother were agitated, and began to wring their hands, and finally ran out into the courtyard, leaving Aunt Zita and me alone.

Sometimes when the enmity between my mother and Aunt Zita had reached an unbearable pitch, and Aunt
Zita's fire was raging unchecked in the house, my father went out silently to the stables. He climbed up the stone stairs past the gunroom where a stuffed black bear stood holding a small tray, and long-pickled adders, pale as tapeworms, lay coiled in jars. He let himself up through a trapdoor, he reached the belfry, and he hung on the rope. As he hung there, calmly rocking, he could see the blaze of the house his grandfather had built, the windows of the hall horribly enlarged by the tearing flames, and the gargoyles, mid-nineteenth-century replicas of forgotten fears, turn livid and spit fire from their contorted lips. The turrets gave off sprays of flame from their conical roofs, and plumes of black smoke which, like the feathers in Aunt Zita's hats, pranced and nodded in the wind. My father always chose a windy night to go and ring the bell – for then, of course, Aunt Zita and my mother were at their worst. ‘Women grow irritable in the wind,' he said to himself as he passed the sideboard, and the stiff fruit, and made his way out of the dining room to the stables.

At the time of the fire, my father had been a small boy, and he and his elder brother had been fetched down quickly from the nurseries so that their lives could be saved. Aunt Zita was up already, her small face was very white, it may have been that she felt already responsible for the fire. The old cook came into the long gallery to tell my father's mother of the disaster. The new electricity, which with the new running water in the house had meant a sudden, rash importation of warring elements, had burnt out its wires in the attics and lumber-rooms. The fine lamps, converted from porcelain Chinese urns, the polite chandeliers with glass fingers holding bulbs of electric light, were consumed by the primal fire, scorched black and then left to darkness. That night, my father's mother and her family stayed in the stables while the firemen leapt helplessly in the flames. The horses that had brought them on their wagons stood obediently in the stable courtyard. They were as black as funeral horses, and as the blaze died down and the house was gutted, they became invisible.

My mother and father came back into the dining room, still in a state of confusion. Aunt Zita and I had only exchanged glances.

‘You put that boy up to it,' my mother said to me. ‘What's his name?'

My father was too angry to speak. His wing of chicken lay in front of him on his plate. The knife and fork lay across it, forming a barrier.

‘You got Maurice to ring the bell,' my mother said.

Aunt Zita pursed her lips and then smiled. It was still dim in the dining-room, for the leaves were coming down all the time in the winds, and falling in the Hen Pond and clogging the sluice, and I saw my mother strain to look at her, to see if she was encouraging me in this terrible prank. Aunt Zita's face told her nothing.