The Bad Sister (33 page)

Indeed they would have been. The child was the eldest.
My father would have had to go away, to live miles distant from his youth. My mother wouldn't have had to live where she did – and there would have been no visits from Aunt Zita. The child was to grow into a strong character, who killed his sister's jealousy with scorn. Had he lived she would scarcely have come to her old home, to bend the walls and contort the valleys and gain her freedom again and again on the back of the north wind. As they watched, and the infant gave a feeble scream at the first splash of cold water, they saw the difference its survival would have made to all of them. At this moment, my mother too saw the difference – and as she stared at the almost-invisible face of the child, a whole lifetime of another life, in another house with a man who was my father but also another man from my father, ran out in front of her like smoke and filled the church. I had to hold her, as she became restless at my side. Willie and Minnie looked away from her. When the bubble burst, and she found herself alone, crossing the hall towards my father's study to tell him that lunch was ready, I ran behind her and clung on to her arm. She always looked down at me, and caught my eye, and smiled.

My mother's trick, however, was frequently turned against her by Aunt Zita. Once summoned, the long-dead relations never entirely went away, and after her first anguish at coming up against the past, Aunt Zita would introduce them and laugh in triumph at my mother's confusion. On our walks, which were circular, monotonous and named after the days of the week so that the inevitability of their recurrence hung heavy from one week's end to the next, they would appear like the grotesque, revolving figures on a clock: sometimes naked, my father's elder brother and three muscular, straw-boatered friends playing early-morning tennis on the disused tennis court; sometimes in bright dresses with bright plaid shawls, coughing daughters taking the damp air in the hills. My mother always turned pale when she saw them, and twisted her hand round the handkerchief she kept with her all the length of Aunt Zita's visit, and her hand became a round
ball. Aunt Zita sometimes spoke to her relatives. Polite words and laughter were exchanged. At these times Aunt Zita's fire burned low, and there was a crushing quietness in the air, which was difficult to breathe, as if it had been dumped in the valley by the mountains, and was being held down by them. Clouds of midges, which came in the warm spell after Aunt Zita's abrupt autumn, made floating heads beside the talkers. Yet the strange part was that despite the quietness I could never understand what they were saying. In these lost conversations with the dead, the vowels and inflexions were far away and incomprehensible. Did my mother understand? More than I did, I thought – but I never liked to ask her. We would all stand sometimes, by the corner of the farm steading, for as much as ten minutes while Aunt Zita chatted with her family. To the right of us were the byres, and The Street where the farm workers lived, and if we were to follow it we would be enmeshed in the Tuesday walk, along the side of the steepest mountain. If we tuned to the left, parallel lines of melancholy firs would lead us into the depths of the valley, into the deepest corner of the cup, which held a small lake scattered with islands. I looked up at the hill, and wondered if we would go for the Tuesday walk. Already the mists were coming down, first in thin furls separated by purple strips of heather, so that the base of the mountain seemed to be detached from the ground and to have become a great tapestry, a menacing wall-hanging striped with flares of dim purple. Beyond this uncertain fabric was the land where Aunt Zita's family lived. I thought of her elder brother going back there, with his adoring mother on his arm. It was cold there, and the mist went straight into the lungs. On the days Aunt Zita trapped us at the crossroads, the muddy intersection by the farm buildings, and kept us waiting as she flirted with her elder brother, I prayed that we would go to the left, follow the valley to its natural end, slap up against the lake and the ravine. I shrank from Aunt Zita's tricks, and swore I would never humour her again.

After the first week of Aunt Zita's visits the blue shadows left the corners of the house and the north wind lay quiet behind the hills. My father stopped rubbing his nose, and stood instead at his study window staring up at the sky. An Indian summer had come. But it was like a woman with skirts cut off up to the knee – startled and unsure. The mornings and early evenings were white and cold, ragged, where the real, long summer had been as round and full in each day as the first navigator's picturing of the globe. The flowers in my mother's herbaceous borders had been nipped once, and made little response to the false sun. The petals of the white flowers were as dry as paper. Only I was every year deluded, and went to fetch my dog from Willie and Minnie's, down the hill (Aunt Zita wouldn't have a dog in the house); for that week, which was no more than a chink in the fortifications of winter, I thought that everything had become all right again, and we ran on the grassy path as if the frosts hadn't seized the yellow, scythed grass and turned it as sere as an old man's tea-stained moustaches.

In that week, as if deluded too by the artificial season, the landscape turned back to normal again. Aunt Zita's fire was very low, her first impact had gone, and she sulked in the simulacrum of the beautiful days which had preceded her coming. The quarried side of the mountain which faced the east of the house no longer had the stamp of her features in the slate jutting of her jaw, or the mossy overhang of her dark hair. Her arms no longer lay along the top ridges of the mountains, white as marsh mist, resting nonchalantly on cloudberries and pools of peat water. The correspondences, too, were gone: the greenhouse, a lurking monster when my mother went to see if the apricots were ripe, became a simple house of glass. In the derelict old forest, where fungus was demolishing the trees and where in her first week Aunt Zita flapped as a bright jay or trotted with a fox stink along the path just ahead of my mother, no changes or conversions took place. The return of summer showed the three-legged stool as a raft of bracken and
prickly bush. In the half-fallen glades, where the souls of changed people wandered and rested in portals of shadow and rotting bark, there were only the signs of the frost's first attack: toadstools bitten at the edges, lichen on the birch trunk that looked as if it had been sprayed with a deadly gas. My mother took advantage of this week of respite to revisit the places she had always been most drawn to. It was pathetic to watch her pleasure at their recovery. We started the walks in that period, and came back for lunch later every day, with my mother beaming with health, and Aunt Zita, even if she had conjured her brother and her mother and her delicate sisters, pale and suffering from their infectious cough. It was enough for my mother to see the house obedient to her once more, for the rooms to have returned to the functions which my mother had allotted them, for the views on to the gardens to lack the herbalists' symmetry and to show her ordinary, colourful borders for her to glow all the more with restored confidence. In these days Aunt Zita smoked a lot, and crushed the stubs at the lunch table into a crystal container near my father's plate. I saw him for the first time look at her in distaste. Her lighter was gold and tubular, but it was clear, as she lifted it to the tip of a cigarette, that she was the one who supplied its fire. My mother, who didn't smoke, was able at last to exchange glances the length of the table with my father. He looked back at her gravely as the smoke rose over his food and banked about three feet above his head, before drifting to the edges of the room.

In these ordinary days Aunt Zita went often to the old nurseries, as if trying to exorcize the power of her family in the surroundings where she had been most helpless and dependent on them. I followed her there, in the long passages, leaving my exultant mother alone with my father, and feeling for Aunt Zita as I always did, in her icy loneliness. She was small, smaller than my mother, and she went on these pilgrimages with a straight back and a high head. The house, no longer under her control, seemed only grudgingly to let her pass, and the dim prints of ambitious,
hatted women had averted eyes. If Aunt Zita failed to find her power again, she would have to leave, to terminate her visit: a scandal, a triumph for my mother which she could never survive. Every year, in the white, fallow week that lay between her arrival and the first winter storms, it seemed that she would never recover herself. The whispering maids on the upper floor were silent. Uncle Ralph, aware immediately of the decline of her influence, came down to meals and brought with him butterflies and moths pinned on thin wood, long lists of new words for the ideal language he was inventing, and trays of the jumbled innards of Swiss watches, which coiled and slithered like caterpillars, and once caught between his agile fingers were turned to engine a miniature car or a talking manikin.

‘Ralph, where are you living now?' Aunt Zita would ask.

My mother looked trapped at this, and stared anxiously at the knives and forks beside her place, as if they were imprisoning her.

‘Still in Malmesbury?' Aunt Zita pressed. It seemed unfair indeed that my father's brother should be allowed to stay the year long in the turrets of his childhood while she, doomed to roam the world for husbands, excitement, fire, was rationed to three weeks. My father looked at her over his steaming plate. Since there were no more banquets in the gold-festooned kitchen after hours, and the shrieking of the north wind seemed as if it had never been, the shepherd's pies and stews normally consumed had taken on the appearance of perfectly acceptable food. I heard Aunt Zita sigh. Without her aides she was impotent. The party-going crowd, courtiers, dwarfs, turbanned merchants, no longer came to her room in the night. Her yellow diamond, confronted with the real sun that came in through the dining room windows, looked like a drying patch of yellow water. And her own skin, the marble whiteness fed by fire, was as faded as silk.

‘You know I sold the house in Malmesbury to Wilhelmina a long time ago,' said Uncle Ralph calmly.

‘So where are you living, then?' demanded Aunt Zita.

My mother rose to her feet. The prison had become unbearable to her. On the heated plate on the serving-table lay a log of suet bathed in golden syrup. She gestured to it vaguely. ‘Zita, dear, won't you …'

‘I thought you said you were going to buy a flat in London,' Aunt Zita said to Uncle Ralph.

‘They were much too expensive,' Uncle Ralph replied.

As the suet was eaten, my father, head down in his commanding chair, would spread his fingers on the table and drum there, as if this inner rhythm would shortly take possession of him and march him away to his study. But he was conciliating; he wanted to include Aunt Zita and Uncle Ralph in a summer afternoon as long and innocent as the summer afternoons of the early years of the century, and despite the impossibility of this he suggested the lake, a picnic, a drive out of the valley into the alien country beyond. My mother, knowing that all these outings would be refused, stared into the pictures that hung round the room. Men with vegetable heads, carrot noses, a succession of horticultural Roman Emperors, were arranged on the walls above the flesh-eaters. But their appeal, which was of the age of sympathies and glimpsed affinities, was gone in this white, opaque week of the loss of Aunt Zita's magic. And the heads appeared an affected concept: my mother had never liked them.

When the meal was over, and Aunt Zita was smoking, Uncle Ralph agreed to go to the lake for an afternoon picnic. My mother, of course, would have to go with them – to take the sandwiches from the basket, to rest the scalding kettle on the damp outdoor fire. She accepted her fate although Aunt Zita would be left the house, and might cruelly have transformed it by the time she returned. She glanced at me, in the hope I would go to the lake with them. I stayed with Aunt Zita.

Aunt Zita walked at speed to the nurseries, once the car had left the front of the house, and my mother, staring apprehensively at the sky for a sign of a break in the weather, a portent of the return of the north wind, was no longer
visible, a white scarf tied over a straw hat in the seat at my father's side. Aunt Zita, in her narrow boots, took on the whole enmity and indifference of the house, and if it seemed that the walls might lean in on her and suffocate her she went all the faster, to elude their toppling embrace. In the heart of the house there was none of the summer that dallied outside. It was dark, and slightly warm. There was a smell of mothballs, and an irregularity in the worn brown carpets, as if moles tunnelled and had thrown up hills. After the glare of the hall, and the bright departure to the lake, the women in the prints were hardly visible – a blur of a hat, like my mother's tied under the chin with a gauze scarf – sourly disapproving of Aunt Zita's aims.

It would be clear to anyone that Aunt Zita was in search of love. She moved with determination, buttocks hardly moving in the long strides her legs accomplished, her walk seeming to hold in fire which might otherwise fall from her and be wasted. In my ignorance of love, I watched Aunt Zita in the afternoons of her powerless week, falling into ecstasies which seemed to me only part of her magic strangeness. It was odd, certainly, that she was only possessed of the craving when her spirits were low and the world was no longer at her command. And the look in her eyes I was then quite incapable of translating. As she went into her transports of joy, they burned with the adoration of suffering. They pleaded for more pain.

In the old nurseries, which we reached after twisting and turning in corridors as black and airless as Roman streets, there was darkness and absence of calm. The fat yew trees outside the window, once trim and gathered in at head and foot, had stray branches like escaping hair. The branches waved vaguely at the window. In the biggest room, where Aunt Zita's elder brother awaited her embrace, the walls were patterned with trees and berries; plump pigeons sat on the intersecting branches. A faint trickle of soot always seemed to come down this chimney, and it rustled on the shell of white paper in the grate. Above the mantelpiece was a religious scene, in ceramic.