The Bad Sister (37 page)

In the time before the hills took in the bomb, and while Aunt Zita was waiting for the north wind to rise again, we went to the Hen Pond almost every day; and at some point we took Uncle Wilhelmina with us, for he had arrived unexpectedly and the yellow telegram, delivered by Peg in innocence to Aunt Zita rather than my mother, had given no more than a few hours' notice. Uncle Wilhelmina stood by the short, artificial shore of the Hen Pond with a pained expression on his face. The slab of water, apparently animated by mechanical ripples, was unappealing to him. The clouds going fast across the sky did not reflect in the waters of this reservoir from which the dynamo drew its power. Uncle Wilhelmina seemed to lean against the wind as if it were a stuffed bolster and could be depended on to support him. His nose flared out and one lurid cheek was presented in profile.

Although my father hoped not to have to go to the expense, the blockages in the Hen Pond had reached a level where Uncle Ralph's anticipated draining had to take place. The water went out more quickly than Uncle Ralph had imagined, and he looked downcast almost at the lack of drama, and the empty pond like a gash in the side of the hill, with some small fish smacking against each other in the agony of air, and old bootlaces which Uncle Ralph at first claimed were eels. Some of the men from the farm poked the leaves away from the sluice with sticks. They lifted the wooden sluice gate and took it out altogether. Uncle Ralph rubbed his hands as the water went down into the thin burn with a roar and spat up at the banks which were high, with small precipices and cliffs. The dying fish nearest the sluice went down, belly up. Uncle Wilhelmina still stared at the sky, as if relief would come to him from the clouds, or from the hostile peewits, which shrieked and moaned over their invisibly demarcated land.

Aunt Zita, when all the family went to the Hen Pond, stood on her own on the narrow ridge of unnatural sand at the far end from the sluice and looked out at the water and her relatives as if she were on a short holiday at Lac
d'Annecy. She would wear one of her hats with feathers on these occasions, and was counting on the feathers, perhaps, to act as a weathervane, for when they began to toss violently in a wind that was coming round increasingly to the north, she smiled to herself and then at her brothers. When the feathers were still, seeming against the steep side of the hill to be growing like black thistles out of the ground behind her, she frowned and stared down at her slender anklestrap shoe on the beach. Then, for want of anything better to do, she summoned her elder brother, and my father's mother, and she stood with them on a piece of driftwood which from a distance looked like a smart pier, a jetty from which they might all embark on a steamboat cruise on the lake. My father's elder brother would appear astonished if Uncle Wilhelmina was there, for he had last seen his youngest brother when he was dressed in long white gowns, with ribbons in his long, golden hair.

‘Shall we go on the Tuesday walk?' my mother said. She added that there was time, if we left now, to go along the side of the hill and do the Tuesday walk ‘properly', by returning in time for lunch along the back road. Uncle Wilhelmina at once burst into a shrill laugh.

‘I shall go home,' he said. ‘And then – I must say I have ordered the car – I shall leave!'

Uncle Wilhelmina walked back alone to the house from the Hen Pond, picking his way over the relics of a slate quarry and through sudden patches of reptilian green where water ran under the ground. His suede boots were purple and fringed with Robin Hood streamers; the height of the heel would have taken him down the long galleries of Versailles, over the bone-dry parquet, and, returned by the mirrors set in solar systems of gold leaf, he would have appeared as a receding army. But in the hills, where the distant ridges of the mountains followed each other monotonously, and were sometimes interrupted by ridges of cloud that looked as if they had come up like hot vapour from their flanks, Uncle Wilhelmina seemed alone and absurd. Lacking a reflection, cut off from the shadow
courtiers who looked back at him from the depths of his glass, he stumbled over the burn by the grey stone wall that separated farm from hill. He wandered along The Street as he had done half a century ago with his mother, when with her eye she seized the windows and with her hand took bread and mittens from a rush basket. The people from the village looked at him without interest. Uncle Wilhelmina's suit was made of cloth of gold, but no one in the village was interested. Nor did Uncle Wilhelmina pay the slightest attention to the innovations in The Street, the indoor toilets that were beginning even in the war to be installed, and the bright wallpaper covered in triangles and birds and dots.

Uncle Wilhelmina came for his few visits in a big car driven by a chauffeur. The chauffeur went outside the valley, to find an inn where he could stay while he waited for Uncle Wilhelmina to decide when he wanted to go back. Uncle Wilhelmina took a long time to get into the house, and his cages of birds and boxes of lizards were carried up by the driver and by Minnie to his room. Immediately he released the birds, but it was some hours before they flew against the windows in a desperate attempt to get south. They were crushed by the journey, and sat on the fender in Uncle Wilhelmina's room, behind which Minnie had lit a coal fire. The lizards, which appeared on the backs of chairs in the hall and along the gilded frames of pictures long after he had gone, escaped early from the big room under Uncle Ralph's where Uncle Wilhelmina was always put, and their bright blue eyes jumped like blue fire from their hiding-places. Minnie wrung her hands when she saw them going up the wall, tree-lizards whose blatant green was quite incapable of adapting to the chrome walls and plaster cornices.

Uncle Ralph classified his dead objects fifteen feet over the head of Uncle Wilhelmina's live reptiles and aviary, and it may have been this unsuitable closeness that ended Uncle Wilhelmina's visits so suddenly – or the silver birch tree, the only one of its kind that grew so near the house, which tossed its thin branches and small silver-green leaves incessantly
at the window, making a sound like the sighing feathers in Aunt Zita's hats. At any rate, he always went as unexpectedly as he came. Sometimes he forgot a bird – a macaw or a Java sparrow with a beak as thick as a wooden whistle, and they circled and cried on the upper landing, where there was a skylight and the illusion of escape. Then, the deep house below turned to jungle at the sound of their sudden, spitting cries, and the ghostly maids who danced attendance on Aunt Zita swayed in their attic rooms like birds caught in a net of creepers.

On the night that Uncle Wilhelmina arrived, the great bell was sounded by the wind in the granite
campanile
intended by my father's grandfather as a tribute to Renaissance glory – the achievements of those great philosophers and artists being equal in his mind to his own. The railways which lay like cracks across the placid face of his country, the factories and mills that shoved their snouts to the sky, and which bore his name, the portraits he had had painted of his thin-faced daughters and brown-haired wife whose parting down the middle of her head divided her as neatly as an apple – these were his joy and pride. And on that night, when the bell rang out and the wind began to climb in the chimney, Aunt Zita went off to her second ball, and I with her.

‘I haven't got a room ready for Wilhelmina as I didn't know he was coming,' my mother said. ‘He can go in the Lavender, I suppose.'

This went unanswered. My father peeled an orange, and the pith floated down from his fingers to his plate. Aunt Zita lit a cigarette. We rose without coffee and went into the hall to greet my father's youngest brother. Minnie was there, heaving a birdcage. She had never liked Uncle Wilhelmina. A tall black bird, with wings folded like an umbrella, looked out at her. Uncle Wilhelmina followed, in a suit with several pockets and a small silk handkerchief fluttering from each one. In this way, he resembled a conjuror's trick – and Aunt Zita smiled at him for a moment with a certain fondness before she remembered
her own magical performances, and the strenuous night that lay ahead. I saw her wonder whether Uncle Wilhelmina's arrival would spoil her ball – and I saw her decide she would not let this happen. Aunt Zita's shoulders went back, and the soft blue flame, which had been licking round her since the growing of the wind, went out in a display of gold, and the vivid green that can sometimes be seen in the depths of a fire, and feathers of pale red. Aunt Zita, gracefully bowing and placing her small feet with the precision of a peacock, moved away from Uncle Wilhelmina and across the hall. The gold fire round her bounced off the walls and ceiling like droplets of wine.

In the sitting-room, where my mother had hoped to sit quietly with her needlework, occasionally glancing at my father to see whether he had fallen asleep or not, and where Aunt Zita had hoped to gather her spirits for the long ride on the back of the wind, changes had already been brought about by the coming of Uncle Wilhelmina that distressed my mother and father very much, and made Aunt Zita give off a loud and uncharacteristic laugh. Uncle Wilhelmina, having said he was tired, had gone to his unaired, vaulted room with his birds and his long boxes of lizards – but he had spread already in the house the strongest secretions from his skin, the waves, as violently coloured as Aunt Zita's, from his wandering mind. In his spectrum, the house lost all finite qualities and, roomless, wall-less, sprawled in the contours of a tent over the forbidding valley. It was impossible to see to the end of the folds of desert-wide striped silk, Bedouin soft ceilings and sagging walls without corners. Uncle Wilhelmina's scarlet parrots flew high in the air. Bunches of artificial roses and violets lay on the wildly patterned strips of carpet in the sand. There was a smell of the circus, and a dryness from the wind outside that made Aunt Zita's nose twitch; and standing about bemused were men in blue-and-white aprons, and my father's mother and my father's elder brother. Then, as the image faded, and my mother made her way to the usual armchair (which she
chose so as not to have to share a sofa with Aunt Zita), my father said:

‘Wilhelmina looks quite well, I think.'

Aunt Zita rose. She seemed shaken but determined. I saw her glance quickly round the room, with its staid furniture and William Morris prints on the curtains and chairs, and I saw her realize that her mother – my father's mother – who had so loved her youngest son, who had poured her love into him after the death of her eldest, had gone after him, in search of him perhaps upstairs. And in Aunt Zita's jealousy, when, running with her brothers, she had fallen on the concealed iron ring of the door in the grass and made a long-forgotten scar on her leg – in the jealousy of half-remembered rebuffs, and the cries behind the Racket Court when the youngest brother was scooped into his mother's arms, and the dark trees round the field where the ice house had been planted in the ground, Aunt Zita took me fiercely by the arm and led me out of the room with her. My mother looked up, tried to stop me with her eyes, and sighed.

The upper part of the house, as Aunt Zita had suspected, was a jungle now rather than a cocoon of desert silk to keep out the bright blue, metal nights. Creepers swung in ropes from the spiral staircase that led up to Uncle Ralph's room where he lay in hiding like a sloth, unable to bear the meeting with Uncle Wilhelmina. There were too many birds in the air, and they seemed also to spiral as they flew, wings beating, like a column of fiery smoke towards the dusty skylight in the roof. There was a smell of French tobacco. And the men in blue-and-white aprons stood in the recessed doorways of the rooms … and as we ran, Aunt Zita and I, to the nurseries, we saw the trail of artificial violets on the bumpy carpet in the corridors, and a smear of blood on the speckled black lino of the nursery bathroom, where my father's eldest brother looked out from his club and his straw-hatted friends … and we ran, to the room where once the faded yew berries had waited for Aunt Zita and my father's elder brother. Now there was red velvet on
the walls, and mirrors that threw back the shifting limbs and shadows of waterfront brothels, and a chandelier that looked like dangling gold paper. Aunt Zita moaned with disappointment. Somewhere, beyond the scabrous mirrors, amongst the ruddy men, stout, and in their aprons striped like closing blinds, my father's eldest brother was drawn into the sink of Uncle Wilhelmina's life. His strictness gone, his sweet adherence to his principles removed at one blow, he lounged for ever in a smoky room above a quay, with pimps and harlots and criminals, with all the restless, heaving tripe of humanity that could never be imagined in this narrow valley, peopled as it was with whey-faced men and women hard in their work and morals. Aunt Zita gazed after him in anguish. I supposed my father's mother must be in there too, pale and out-of-place as an English watercolour in that bar. She would be searching too, but this time for both her sons, who had slipped into her maternal nightmares of homosexuality, hashish and release.

Aunt Zita took me to her room, so that we could dress quickly for the ball. We rose in the spiral staircase beside the birds, and we listened for the wind, which was subdued by their cries and the frantic beatings of their wings. But we could hear it there, like the grey breakers of a running sea on the walls of the house.

My father's mother had had a wooden bird carved at the top of the coiling banister of the stair; and on its head, its wooden pelican's head, sat a cluster of humming-birds escaped from Uncle Wilhelmina's cages. The pelican pecked at its breast, to tear flesh to feed its young: I had often seen my father's mother standing there, the consequences of her feeding all round her in the house – with Uncle Ralph a few paces behind her in his Martian space chamber behind locked doors, and Aunt Zita, fretting in her black lace gown for the next falling in love at the ball, and my father sleeping, deep in the accounts of the farm, while my mother dreamed of Aunt Thelma. Now, the pelican stood rooted to its wooden column without her
and the humming-birds made round nests in the skylight above its stern, bald head and plucking beak.