Authors: Grace Wynne-Jones
‘The mountains were huge.’ Aggie is telling Nathaniel about her holiday in the Alps with Joseph. ‘It was summer, but the biggest ones were still covered in snow. We went up one on a chairlift. The houses in the valley looked so small from the top… like ants lived in them.’ She laughs; then she turns to me. ‘What happened to that music box, Sally? The one I bought there. I’d love to hear it again. It played “Edelweiss”, didn’t it?’
‘Yes. Yes, it did.’ I bite my lip and scrunch the empty bag of crisps. ‘I must look for it.’ I can’t bear to tell her that I suspect Mum may have delivered it to some charity jumble sale and then forgotten she gave it away. It’s the kind of thing she used to keep when we lived in our rambling old home in California, where there was more space for all kinds of things.
‘Ah, here are the chips and sausages!’ Nathaniel announces. ‘You must be famished, Aggie.’ He sets the plate before her, and she stares at it. She’s never really hungry these days. She eats because other people want her to.
‘They’ve done the chips well.’ Aggie picks one from the plate and munches it with what looks like pleasure. I can’t believe I’m letting her do this. A year ago I would have dragged her back to her bed, whether she wanted to go or not. It would never have occurred to me to go to a pub with a battered, ancient aunt and a man I hardly know, not to mention a dog who looks as though he’s been through a hedge backwards. I would have wanted everything to be tidier and more orderly. I would have wanted Diarmuid to come along and take charge and sweep us off to somewhere more sensible…
And in that place Aggie’s eyes would have grown dull again. She would be lost to us, and I wouldn’t have been sad, because I would have thought that was all that was left of her. I would have been wrong. What’s shining from her now is her soul, her spirit; and, though she is old, that is timeless. And in this moment, this strange and maybe stupid moment, I simply can’t believe that part of her will ever die.
Tears spring to my eyes, and Nathaniel senses it; he reaches out and squeezes my hand softly. Aggie is halfway through her chips and sausages, and she isn’t even using a fork. I wish Mum were here to see this. She’d probably think she was dreaming. Even I can’t believe this is the same Aggie who can sometimes hardly speak with tiredness, who can barely totter to the toilet on her walking frame and who spends most of her time lying blankly on her bed. Now she’s like an excited child allowed to stay up way past her bedtime. Maybe she’ll refuse to leave the pub until the fat lady sings.
Aggie is asking Nathaniel if he’s lived in other countries. ‘I wish I had,’ she says. ‘I only know one place, really: this part of Dublin. I haven’t seen the world, apart from a few holidays.’
Nathaniel tells her about New York, the snow and the sirens, and the buzz of all those dreams humming electrically on sultry summer nights in Central Park. Then he tells her about Rio.
‘Oh, you’ve been there!’ Aggie exclaims excitedly. ‘Did you meet my sister, DeeDee Aldridge?’
Nathaniel looks at me.
‘She was probably wearing a wide-brimmed hat, a tangerine-coloured hat – she loves that colour. And in that sun, of course, she’d probably need a hat, wouldn’t she?’ Aggie is speaking very quickly, clasping and unclasping her hands. ‘She has the kind of face you’d remember. Good bone structure, a very firm jawline. And her eyes look straight at you. They’re blue. A big, bright, honest blue.’
I look at a beer mat. She could be describing Nathaniel’s eyes. Mine aren’t blue… and I doubt if they look that honest or straight. Why did Nathaniel say DeeDee’s eyes in the photo reminded him of mine? What else did he see in that grainy black-and-white image?
‘And good eyebrows. She has great eyebrows, never needs to use a pencil.’
‘I don’t remember being
formally
introduced to her,’ Nathaniel says carefully. ‘But who knows, I could have passed her in the street… or sat in the same bar listening to the same music, watching the same dancing. Rio has its very own folk music, called
chorinho
.’ As he says these exotic words the evening suddenly seems sultry and mysterious, almost sensual. ‘The beaches are huge. The place is so vibrant and alive. There’s so much colour, so much excess and… and sheer
life
.’
‘Yes. DeeDee would like that,’ Aggie says dreamily. ‘She said she wanted to go there because it was a melting pot of different races. It was all sorts of things at the same time.’
‘Oh, yes, there’s been lots of mingling.’ Nathaniel’s smile implies that the mingling probably happened with considerable exuberance and enthusiasm. ‘One survey says there are up to a hundred and thirty-four shades of brown and beige in Brazil. They even have names for them, like paint charts.’
‘What do you mean?’ I ask.
‘The only names I remember are
alverenta,
which means “shadow in the water”, and
café com leite
– that’s coffee with milk. And
acastanhada
– that’s cashew.’
‘What very imaginative skin,’ Aggie says. I can see she’s disappointed that Nathaniel doesn’t know DeeDee personally, but she is also comforted that he might have met her without knowing it.
‘It’s very far away, isn’t it?’ she adds, as if this has just occurred to her. ‘The angels say DeeDee isn’t that far away, but that’s probably in angel miles. They don’t have to take planes and that sort of thing.’ She looks blankly at a wall. ‘I promised Joseph I’d try to find her – and then I didn’t.’
This is a new development. ‘Why did Joseph want you to find her?’ I enquire gently.
‘Because he felt guilty.’ The words slip off her tongue, and then she looks startled, worried that she has revealed more than she meant to. She doesn’t talk about Joseph very much, since he died; I think she prefers to keep her grief to herself. Sometimes, when he’s mentioned, a strange look comes over her face.
‘Why did he feel guilty?’ I persist. ‘I need to know. I really need to know why it’s so important to you that we find her.’
Aggie closes her eyes, and I can see that her body is exhausted even though her spirit wants to party. She is not going to answer my question. The old barriers have returned, and I must respect them. If I try to drag the truth out of her, she’ll just start to cry. I feel a familiar irritation, a desire to shake her, demand that she answer my perfectly reasonable questions; but I must try to be patient. This day has been a superhuman effort for the part of her that is old, and it’s extraordinary that she got so far on her adventure – and it has been an adventure, for all of us.
‘We’ll have to drive her home soon,’ Nathaniel whispers in my ear.
She is slumped in her chair now, visibly drooping. It’s an effort for her to keep her head upright. At least she’s wearing shoes and not slippers, but she has a pink nightdress on underneath her coat.
I decide to turn my mobile phone back on. If Mum rings, at least I can reassure her that we have not bundled Aggie onto a plane for Rio de Janeiro. That’s what I’d really like to do, if DeeDee were alive and Aggie was up to it: I’d like us all to go to South America and maybe never come back. ‘She just ran off to South America with Great-Aunt Aggie, a young man she met at a reception and a mongrel,’ Marie would have to tell people at her family gathering. How amazed they would be. How horrified and intrigued.
Maybe, if you’re going to be a rebel, you should do it with style, like DeeDee. Letting mice out of cages, leaving husbands and taking a stand about spermicidal cream is fairly small stuff, when you could disappear and join the circus – or abscond to a tropical beach. Maybe Nathaniel and I could set up a community for runaways from nursing homes. I smile at the image of our vagabond charges frolicking with their walking frames on some exotic, palm-fringed beach.
‘What are you smiling at?’ Nathaniel nudges me.
‘At wonderful, impossible things.’
‘Lots of people have done wonderful, impossible things because no one told them that they couldn’t. I read that somewhere. I wish I’d made it up myself.’
He’s right, of course. Why are we all so quick to agree on what is possible? We let other people tell us who we are, and we listen to their stories until we feel we have to get married because the hotel has been booked and cousins are flying in from Canada and the entire family has bought expensive outfits. We promise to love someone forever because we love the idea, and because not doing it would be too bloody inconvenient.
I look at my watch. God, we must go. The family will be going apeshit.
Aggie is telling Nathaniel that he is very like a young man she once knew, who used to collect wildflowers for her in the Dublin mountains. They went to dances together on his bike, with her sitting on the crossbar. One summer evening they ran into the sea in all their clothes.
‘We should have taken them off, of course,’ she says. ‘But it was warm. They dried quickly in the breeze.’
I stare at her. I’m seeing a new, wild side to her this evening. ‘What happened to him?’ I hope I don’t look too surprised.
‘He went to Australia. He wanted me to come too, but it seemed so far away.’ She twists a paper napkin between her fingers. ‘Sometimes I wish I had gone. Then DeeDee would still be with us.’
‘What do you mean?’ I say, too quickly.
The closed look comes over her face again. ‘Nothing, dear. I’m just being a silly old woman.’
‘Tell me… please, Aggie. I want to understand.’
‘These sausages are overdone. I don’t want any more of them.’ She leans over and puts the plate on the floor. Fred gulps the sausages down in a nanosecond. ‘But I’d like another cup of tea before we leave.’
I’m still thinking about what Aggie let slip about DeeDee when Nathaniel returns with the tea. Now that DeeDee is dead, maybe I shouldn’t try to press Aggie for more details; but there is a part of me that likes being a detective. It’s why I went into journalism. I used to love interviewing well-known people and trying to get a glimpse of what made them tick. I loved trying to get behind their masks to their truth. But then I bought the cottage and found there was a bigger market for my articles about interior decoration, and I had to pay my mortgage somehow.
My mobile rings. Oh, dear… it’s bound to be a very angry relative, even though I did text Mum to say Aggie was tucking into sausages and chips and would be home shortly. I take a deep breath and gulp down the bit of red wine that’s left in my glass.
It’s April. ‘I’m sorry, April, I can’t talk now,’ I say. ‘Can I call you later?’
‘It’ll only take a moment,’ April says quickly. ‘Look, could you get Mum’s birthday present for me? I’ll send on the cheque when you tell me how much it costs. Spend about seventy bucks.’ She is sounding more and more American. I imagine her sitting, blonde and tanned, by her apartment’s communal pool, her skin buffed and toned and almost gleaming. She never gets freckles like I do.
‘What do you want me to get her?’ I ask resignedly. April only remembers family birthdays at the last minute. I seem to have become her official present-buyer, which is probably why I never get presents from her myself.
‘Whatever you think she’d like.’
‘But I don’t know what she’d like. She’s a complicated person when it comes to presents. She gets rid of anything she doesn’t have an immediate use for.’ I find myself remembering the house in California, with its trinkets and its coloured mugs and ten brands of tea; the seashells from the beach, the pieces of driftwood, the strangely shaped stones.
‘Something that smells good.’
‘She’s very fussy about perfume.’
‘Oh, just get her anything. Anything
nice.
And make sure to get it professionally wrapped. Presentation is so important.’ April pauses. ‘So how are you, anyway? Have you started dating again?’
I rise from the table. Nathaniel is putting sugar into Aggie’s tea; he adds milk, then stirs it for her. It’s almost like a ceremony. Aggie looks sleepy but contented as she watches. I want to hug Nathaniel and thank him for being here and being just as he is. I wouldn’t change a thing about him, in this moment – not even his car, or his fringe, which is too long and partly covers his honest blue eyes. He feels me watching and looks up at me.