The Bad Sister (41 page)

Everyone heard the car when it roared back over the hills, and sighs of relief were muffled by the accordion thump. Jimmy wasn't dead, nor yet had he crashed into the hall and finished off the celebrations. After he passed, someone dared to open the door and go out to set about lighting the bonfire. There was a new frost to the air already, and the black, poisonous smell of the death car's fumes.

If Aunt Zita and my mother and father were in the village hall, Jimmy couldn't get at the car of course, and his rage exploded elsewhere. As he couldn't exorcize the threatening spirit of the village at the time of decay and rot, the year turned sour for the whole valley after that. And if they were there, at the high table, and Aunt Zita's haughty fire cast a glow, the villagers sat patiently, waiting for them to leave. And the tension grew, that Jimmy would run out to light the fire before they were gone. For Aunt Zita, lolling against the chimney breast, looked more and more like a doll, ready to be thrown on the lighted sticks. We always went hastily, with Aunt Zita in her defiant whiteness amongst the flushed faces. Down at the house, we ate dinner under dim lights and to the thump, as if our hearts were dropping as we ate, of the accordion up at the hall.

It was only after years of going on the back of the wind with Aunt Zita that I came to understand how we never left the valley at all. The map of the world in the school, and the folds of the pale red continents washed by oceans, and the lakes like half-shut eyes in the green land-masses, were shut in our world, locked in our valley, which, with its circling hills, embraced them all. All the smells and spices of Aunt Zita's most exotic journeys came from Peg's shop: the ground nutmeg in a sample bottle that no one wanted to
buy, and the palms, vivid over blue, on the wrapper of a coconut bar. All of time, which had pulled the land from under the sea, and nibbled at the cliffs, and seeded forests in the world on our map, was in the ancient mountains of our valley. All of recorded time, which had set men to pile stones, and hammer iron, and draw the exquisite wings of blue birds on pyramid walls, lay in the lines of the valley. In the Roman camp, where Uncle Ralph went to dig for coins, or segments of gold drinking vessels, centurions had sat in their interminable tedium, gazing out at the hills. Below the camp, where the hills went more gently towards the loch, the bones of animals preserved a million years made leaf patterns in the rock. In the village under the school, men long freed from the Romans armed themselves against the coming of the Hammer of the Scots. Steam from the first train went up into the clouds above our valley. And my father, locked in the soaring buttresses of his grandfather's dream, paced the confines of his land, from the stone effigies of the men who had fought to take it from each other, to the Romans yawning at their unprofitable empire, and back again to the castle of material gain. The world and history lay obediently within its bounds.

So, on the night of the bad omens, the night for which Aunt Zita had waited with such impatience, we flew the breadth of the world, and the world we had known at our first awakening opened up to us. In its fears, the night of storms took us to the hour of our birth. In the calm, ordered mansion where Aunt Zita danced in the tropical air, we knew the caress of infancy, the stately unchangeable march of the days.

It made no difference to Aunt Zita whether the night of her destruction was the night of the rising of the village dead, or a ball, so exactly like all the balls we had gone to, that the seed of her death could be seen only suddenly in the mirrors, or in a shifting arrangement of trees in the grove. But the time was marked, and she and her companions knew it. When the night came, the fissure of evil opened. Aunt Zita danced … with the young men, long dead in the wars, who stood close to her with thin, smiling
lips … she went to the grove, and the fire rolled from her on to the grass already wet with morning. As Aunt Zita laughed, and her eyes shone black in a southern night that could never throw off the frivolous light blue of its sky … and her flames were caught and paraded in the mirrored ballrooms in silver torches … as she leapt, the village made ready to burn her … and the snow, hiding behind Pacific stars, prepared its blinding, annihilating descent. Aunt Thelma was coming. Louisa, emblem of carnal love denied, wove her mad patterns among the stones. Persecution and injustice rose with pitchforks, and marched on Aunt Zita as she danced.

Aunt Zita was quickly burned. She was subsumed in her own element. The people from the village dragged her by the hair, past Peg's shop, and put her on a pyre by the farm steading, where one road went off to the Tuesday walk, and the fabric of hill that hid Aunt Zita's family, and the other road went to the loch. She burned as quickly as paper. And in the small crowd was Maurice, and the forest of willow-herb hissing around him, and Peg from her dusty shop, her hair bound up behind her small head.

Aunt Zita's face hung for a while in the air, after the flames had eaten her. She looked suddenly like one of her imaginary companions – like a white paper mask, a moon-shaped kite with the night coming in the slits, for eyes.

The snow began to fall. It fell first on the heights, and turned the stones to shrouds. It fell on the Roman walls, and the bleak precinct of the camp. It fell on the fire where Aunt Zita was burning, and on the forests of larch and fir, and it gave its deathly kiss to the flowers in the autumnal gardens. It fell on the turrets of the house, and made pointed white clown hats on the chimneys. It fell in at my mother's window, as she was brushing her hair before the start of the morning, and she turned and said to her face in the mirror:

‘Isn't it dark today?'

Aunt Thelma had come. The people in the house walked with reverent, bowed steps. The Gothic windows were filled with pale red light. In the hall, when Aunt Thelma summoned the christening scene, there was the smell of sanctity, and my father's mother fell to her knees and prayed. Beside the loch, in the damp afternoons while Uncle Ralph hunted in the shallow water for forgotten treasure, and the minnows played about his wrists, and my mother balanced an iron kettle on the smoking twigs, Aunt Thelma stalked Aunt Zita and my father's elder brother in the ragged wood and tore them apart with curses. The swans beat their wings on the black water when Aunt Thelma came. My father sat alone in his boat, staring up at the clouds in the sky.

When Uncle Wilhelmina made his sudden departure, his birds had flown to the place under the hill where Aunt Zita burned, to circle until the fire fell from their tails and they were no more than black crows, diving and flying in the winter sky. Then the house settled to its quiet, religious seclusion. My father, with the rich, painted food garishly behind his head in the dining-room, blinked at my mother and Aunt Thelma as they talked. In the valley, the white robe fell over the hills. It hid the Elizabethan gardens, and the animated forests, and the arena of memory and magic. It hid Uncle Ralph's fallen stars, and the traces of Uncle Wilhemina's excess, and it sealed the house, to a crypt, to a marble tomb.

In the village, the men came home from fields so hard they rang to the sound of plodding feet. The women picked turnips that lay stinking, half a hairy monkey's head above the ground. They boiled them in water. On Peg's cards, which came tucked in envelopes that looked as if they had never been fresh, the snow was frosted with silver glue and the holly berries were attached to silver bells. Aunt Thelma walked on the frozen path, where in the summer the grass had been so long that it would have hidden her. The long,
white summer was nothing to do with her. Her winters brought penitence, and the short, white days were gasps of breath between the long nights.

The ground was hard in the chicken-run. The midden was crisp with frost. Maurice climbed on the roof of the dynamo, and parcels of snow fell down. The leaves that had clogged the sluice were gone, turned to pulp under the ice.

In the hen-house the hens nudged near to the old man to keep him warm. Maurice climbed the slats, and I followed him. Aunt Thelma had been down to the chicken-run on a tour of inspection, and had looked at the frozen burn, and stamped her feet by the forests of dead willow-herb, which were powerless now, like a child's rusting spears. She hadn't seen the old man when she looked in the hen-house. But a white hen had flown out at her, and she nearly slipped on the frozen chicken shit on the ground.

Maurice crawled out of the hen-house again. We went up the garden. Under a blackcurrant bush, which in the summer before Aunt Zita came had leaves that smelled strong and sweet, a snowdrop stood in the thorns. Maurice picked it and held it up to the light, its petals and its green scribble. We walked up to the house with it, but by the time we were at the house the petals had bruised and fallen. The hardest of the winter was all around us, and it was no herald of the spring.

WHEN THE NORTH
still lay in darkness, and there were rumours of spring from England, my mother packed her suitcases and my father stood on the front doorstep, his eyes staring in a southerly direction. The fields he could see at the end of the drive were the blank white of swallow shit. A lightness in the sky came from hidden snow, and not from the first spring days, which flitted over the country below us like fire burning paper. We were too high, in the black chimney of the north, to take that early glow. On the walls of the house, which had turned the colour of soot, snow and rain fell relentlessly.

My mother packed her clothes with little bags of dried lavender squeezed between them. Aunt Thelma had gone, and with her the Christian festivals which had never been welcomed in the north, and she had left behind her the hard truth of the unending winter: hills that hung over the valley like axe over block; mountains petrified in a mould that would last another iron age. The anvil of the year had turned. Aunt Thelma's lights, and the lacy jabot she wore at Christmas Eve, and the candles she put up around the manger in the hall, had melted and gone. The star which had guided the wise men shone coldly down on us, but no infant could have survived its rays.

My mother held the lavender bags up to her nose before she buried them in the case. Even in their dim colour the flowers bore witness to forgotten gaiety. The summer was prepared to give blues and reds and mauves and marigolds, and my mother was afraid that this might never happen again. For winter paid us hand over fist in the stark colours of economy. Once Aunt Thelma's garlands had been
thrown out, and jaws of ice had bitten them, and the golden straw she had put around the manger had turned to a frozen nest on top of the midden, we saw in the landscape only the bare necessities of distinction. The white sky came down over the crests of the white hills. The white hills yielded to a stripe of brown before going into flat, white fields. And the trees, of the same grudging brown, stood without shadow on the white slopes of the hills.

This state of affairs went on for a long time before my father and mother decided to go south. They endured the death of the Christmas roses, and the growth of the Lenten roses, with their petals of sacrificial purple, in a land that detested icons. They watched every day the light grow heavier and more desperate, as if the new year were trying to drag the house and valley into the new season, and the burden was proving too much for it. They would turn to each other at the barely visible meals, and say: ‘There isn't even anything in the greenhouse this year.' And my mother, after eating the winter food, would go to her room and open books of paintings of countries of the sun.

While my mother looked at orange hills painted by Cézanne, and the blue that fell across them in bolts from the sky, the hills outside folded to monochrome, and the mist in the valley became impenetrable. The house began to prepare itself for our going. Minnie went through the empty rooms on the top landing, shooing away the winter's crop of dead flies and the last, lingering presences of Aunt Zita. A taffeta skirt might stick out of a cupboard, and a pointed shoe. Minnie would hear wind in the chimneys when there was no wind to move the air over the house. And she would see, in the spotted mirrors it was never worth cleaning, the yellow turbans of Aunt Zita's grotesque night companions, and the cut diamonds Aunt Zita wore when she flew off to the ball. Even the corridors seemed determined to confuse rooms and conceal their destinations. Under skylights of rain they snaked and twisted, and Minnie would find herself slap up against a boxroom door or led treacherously down back
stairs to an unimaginable scullery. When she found herself again, the passages were more narrow and secretive than before. They looped and double-turned, and produced cul-de-sacs of identical rooms where Minnie wrung her hands at the dust. Women with long necks and dressed as milkmaids stood in black-and-white prints on the walls. Their faces showed nothing, not even the ignominy of years spent in rooms that appeared only when the house was about to be abandoned. They held wooden pails, to conjure the illusion they were going to milk their porcelain cows, and the pictures hung askew, so that when Minnie, in her trembling rush at the top of the house, tried to set them straight, buckets rocked in elegant hands and blisters of milk showed up on the paper. In the yellow and green fields of their eternal summers, the first iron bridge of the Industrial Revolution hadn't yet cast its shadow. These women had no right to be in the house built by my father's grandfather: he must have brought them in to give himself a sense of ancestry: these haughty women, disguised as humble milkmaids, were the paradox of his own humble origins and princely disguise.

Uncle Ralph, disturbed in his winter cocoon by Minnie's attempt to get the house under control, to lock up the top floor so that none of its ghostly occupants could do damage while we were away, came out at the sound of her rattling keys and stood angry on the landing. My father wanted him to move downstairs in our absence, as if our trip to the south could somehow be echoed by Uncle Ralph's descent of the staircase to the lower floors. My father felt uneasy at leaving Uncle Ralph alone at the top of the house, that he would sway like an ungainly bird in the wind and fall from his winter perch at the coming of spring. Uncle Ralph always refused any blandishments. When my father built an electric train system in two adjoining rooms on the ground floor, knocking holes in the wall for a tunnel, Uncle Ralph went there only for an occasional visit. He played punctiliously with the trains as if to thank my father for the trouble he had taken, and we would hear the hoot of the miniature
express and thunder of carriages over points followed by Uncle Ralph's deliberate march to the spiral stairs that carried him upwards. If greater efforts were made to dislodge him, he climbed away out of sight into a hidden boxroom. There, he would stumble over swarms of sleeping bees, and curl up in old saddles on the floor.

The house smelt of wax for days before we went to the south. Bees suddenly appeared under curtains and in corners. My mother brushed them away. Their drone in the hidden attic was as much of a threat to her as the roar of fire. For she feared that when she came back, after her longed-for journey, the bees would have built a great white labyrinth round the house, and Uncle Ralph would be hardly discernible, peering out at us from his window in the comb.

The south where Uncle Rainbow lived wasn't the orange south of my mother's picture books. It was the south of our own country, and trains took us through the night, against the magnet pull of the mountains, bursting out at last into the night glare of the Midlands, and running in the final drop into an intense green. My father and mother lay in their tiered bunks like stone crusaders. They showed no trace of anxiety at being drawn from the strength of the hills and made to float without defence in an unknown land. Fingers of cold came in on them in the swaying tomb, a quiver of ice arrows to bind them to the north, but they slept on, dreaming of spring. Before the howl of the furnaces, when the country was still hills, the flat white of the implacable winter outside came in through the window in a smell of unwashed basins. The absolute emptiness of the swelling and fading land must have made them think of the country they had left. Yet my mother and father failed to be drawn into the night, under the northern stars. For all the iron persuasion, and the severe necessity of the winter they had known, dreams of flowers and pale blue skies were stronger. Under my mother's lids lay a flickering tapestry, where the trees were just dancing into green.

Warnings of our imminent departure started to appear in the house in the north for some days before we left the valley and went to Uncle Rainbow's. Minnie, puzzled and defeated already by the clamming up of the top of the house, and by the forgotten kitchens slung across landings, where she would think she saw skeletal feasts, black bread held in beckoning fingers, found herself in the downstairs rooms caught up in clouds of butterflies. Straight from my mother's longing for the south, they flew out of cupboards and dropped limply to the floor before going into flight. They crept into the long room where Aunt Zita danced alone when she was courting the north wind, and spread out a million skirts of silk and polka dot. Minnie could see every dress my mother had worn, and some of the old ball-dresses Aunt Zita took from camphor wreaths at the top of the house. She waved her mop at them, but they only rose higher until they became sparks of iridescence in the lights. My father never referred to them. Even when a pair of blue wings hung over his place at the breakfast table, and he looked anxiously for a moment out of the window to see if an Asian landscape lay there instead of northern rain, he said nothing. Corners of his wife's long-discarded dresses animated the house. And as they came with such an intense longing for heat and colour, there was a softer feeling. But the accounts had to be got ready. Reports came in of sheep stranded in snow. The butterflies fell by the windows of the long room, where they had been trying to fly through glass to join the deadly whirl of the snowflakes. Minnie picked up the shreds of material and put them on a table. They made a patchwork that had been ripped apart, and spelt the coming disintegration of the house.

My mother must have known her journey to the pleasures of the south would be dangerous. She knew the winter was like a wild beast by April, and that Aunt Zita, grown huge in its caress, roamed the house unrestrained by my mother's presence. When the trip to the south was over, the house was inspected for damage. Aunt Zita had left the stain of her black shadow on the walls of the upper rooms.
Her teeth had crushed the chimney-stacks, and bitten away the slates on the roof. Where the north wind had come to collect her, it had chafed against the side of the house and broken windows in its terrible impatience. It had pawed the ground, and stampeded flowers and bushes. Yet even the knowledge of these disastrous couplings made little difference to my mother's determination to escape. She locked her room, but it was a pointless act. Minnie refused anyway to come into the house when it was in the grips of the last of the winter. Aunt Zita could go wherever she pleased, and left bat droppings and streaks of soot carried by her fingers to bedspreads and chairs, ready for my mother's return.

When the mist in the valley was so intent on concealing any possible change in the year that it made new shapes from the larchwood, building cities and chimneys of mist, the collection of shells in my mother's bedroom began to glow with her unspoken longing for the south. The shells stood on a table in my mother's bedroom, under a window that looked out on the mysterious archaeology of the clouds. Their fleshy lips gaped at the grim scene. From roseate, polished depths the memories of hot seas rose to haunt my mother. It seemed literally incredible that such things could have been thrown carelessly by Nature on a beach. And there was also something scandalous about the colour: my mother's fingernails, which she painted to the same bright flush, fluttered in the room beside the shells and seemed to taunt the constricting skies outside. It was the colour of pure frivolity; of the flamingo cherubs which might be found, to the consternation of the north, if the heavy skirts of the mist were pulled back and back. My mother stood at the window in the greyness that would shade into night, and held the shells to her head. She heard the sound of the sea, and the rush of the train as it took us to the south. The cowries, pointed and dappled, she left untouched on their stand.

These shells, which took on all the vibrancy of space at the time of our leaving, flew ahead of us to the south and became embedded in the ceiling of Uncle Rainbow's dining-room.
They were paler, and had been washed over in sickly colours, yet it surprised me always to find them there, when I had thought them alone in the empty house in the north. Their pink mouths were open to our gaze. The cowries, with their interior spirals as defeating as the geometry of the house we had left, were ranged on the ceiling like missiles. Uncle Rainbow would look up at the coral reef over his head as we ate. Some of the shells were tiny and green, emerald buttons. The coral lace, spread in fans, had turned yellow with nicotine. And Uncle Rainbow would say, turning to my mother at the table:

‘Did I ever tell you about my last visit to Mauritius?'

In the south, passive listeners to our conversation, these shells from remote seas made no threat to the country outside. The country, deceptively and violently green, needed no provocation. But at first, when I sat in the dining-room in the air that was like breathing in a burrow of long grass, I thought it was as tame at Uncle Rainbow's as it was wild in the north. I knew nothing of the burst of spring. The faces of blossom I saw nodding at the window I thought only gentle and fragrant, in their reassurance of the mildness of the south.

Before we arrived in the room under the shells, when winter and the north crouched behind us and the grey land had gone into fields made green by spring, my mother pulled up the blind in the train and began to wash her face. Cows looked in on her, and new lambs. In the small towns we went through, people rising in the morning saw my mother go past, and raise her towel to the cheeks, and then she had fled from their room into the long, flashing windows of the street. A boy practising a trumpet in a window saw her, and caught her for a moment on the end of a brazen note. And housewives shaking rugs saw her. In the north, my mother had looked out on nothing. Here, everything looked in on her. Nature watched itself with extreme concentration, and drew us into its self-conscious acts.

Uncle Rainbow was my father's cousin. His family had lived a long time in a house in a maze of tall hedges that let
off puffs of yellow dust at the hand of the intruder. The hedges went up to within a few yards of the house, and in the spring the flagstones at the centre of the maze, which held and protected the house even further, sparkled with new rain. Bright blue flowers shot up out of the crevices. As my mother and father, disappearing from time to time in the lineaments of the maze, came up nearer to their goal, to the oak door which would finally take them in to Uncle Rainbow, the window ledges on the upper floors let off a fusillade of white pigeons. The air was heavy with their wings. The windows, no longer watched and guarded, showed very dark over the bowed heads of my mother and father as they walked on the wet grass of the maze.