The Aunts’ House

by Elizabeth Stead

  ‘Please go away – now! This is an enormously valuable painting and on loan!’ said the expert but Barnaby made it all worse by numbering the colours and saying that, in his opinion, there was too much of some and not enough of others and it could have done with a bit more forty-four but on the whole, he quite liked it.

  The expert waved to a guard and Angel’s friend came at a smart pace, tapping his finger on the side of his head, rolling his eyes and grinning all at the same time.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Angel. ‘Won’t happen again.’

  ‘You must learn not to make a sound in a gallery, child. The gentleman with you should know this,’ said the expert.

  ‘I’m not a child!’ said Angel through her teeth. ‘And how do you know Renoir painted that vase of flowers? It could have been one of his students.’

  ‘O! The cheek – the audacity …’

  ‘I’ll take care of it, Miss Benson – you go right along doing what you’re doing.’ And he led Angel and Barnaby Grange to another part of the gallery. The students, almost to the last one, heaved a sigh of disappointment.

  In another room of the great gallery was a wall of colour and movement, framed in gold. It was like the enormous work that had made Angel cry on her first visit. She thought this painting even more magnificent. Barnaby quickly unfolded double pages of his notebook and Angel’s music and its colours adjusted to the mood of the moment.

  ‘That’s The Miracle of the Slave,’ said the guard from a discreet distance. He’d been asked to keep an eye on the unusual pair. ‘It’s by a bloke called Tintoretto, Italy, fifteen hundreds. You’ve got your cast of thousands in this one.’

  While Angel, for a long time in teary silence, gazed hard enough to bore a hole through the painting and Barnaby used his pencil as though it was on skates, two of the art students from the Renoir lecture came to them. One of them went to Barnaby Grange.

  ‘We’re intrigued, sir, with your notebook. We wondered if you’d share your thoughts with us?’

  Barnaby, Angel thought, did look like a gentleman of creative talents and she was proud when he held open the notebook for them. The pages, of course, were covered in numbers of squares and doubles and triples and calculated equations.

  ‘O, silly us,’ said a student. ‘We thought you’d sketched a painting.’

  ‘I did,’ said Barnaby. In words.

  On the way back to the boarding house Barnaby’s hand was not so dependent on Angel’s. He walked in a satisfied and confident way – head up and smiling.

  ‘Did you like the gallery, Barnaby?’

  ‘Yes.’ A word.

  ‘Do you want to go again?’

  ‘Yes!’ An emphatic word.

  ‘How about that Slave picture?’

  ‘O!’ A word. ‘I have it all here. I will teach you.’

  ‘Okay.’

  They walked silently down Duffy Street to the boarding house in a gloom. The street was stony brown and grey, air the colour of hopelessness and a million miles from the smell of oils and watercolours. Almost dead, dry-as-bone hedges supported fences pocked by termites, footpaths needed repair and their kerbs were snapped in part, like sea biscuits. Even the gully seemed to have had its green covered in dust. Everything was still. There was no breeze at all. Nothing.

  ‘There is no colour here, Barnaby.’

  ‘Yes. Different.’ In words. ‘Nine, seventeen and thirty-three … and I will work it out for you … different.’

  ‘Okay.’ Angel was fairly sure that some of Barnaby’s numbers meant nothing at all but she was delighted to have found a friend in the terrible house. She couldn’t understand why he stayed there. Barnaby Grange did not seem to be short of money. In the meantime, he could teach her numbers, she could teach him music and they could share colours.

  ‘I’m hungry, Barnaby. I wonder what’s for dinner tonight.’

  ‘Terrible squared, doubled and tripled. Not like Cookie’s.’ Barnaby remembering.

  ‘That bad?’

  ‘Mutton neck and spuds,’ moaned someone as they entered the house. It didn’t matter who.

  ‘Very Pottsy. Not England.’ Barnaby remembering.

  ‘Where’ve you two been? And where did you get those clothes and sandals like all get out, Angel Martin? You were supposed to be on the wringer in the laundry before school. What have you been up to? Where did you get those clothes?’

  ‘A friend gave them to me.’

  ‘O, I see, it’s friends now is it? Is that what they call them now?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean, Missus Potts.’

  ‘O, yes, you do! What have you been up to with me needing lard and shin and now it’s too late.’

  ‘I’ve been learning, Missus Potts, that’s all. Just learning. And so has Mister Grange, and I didn’t steal the clothes. A lady who used to know my mother gave them to me, and I’m sorry, Missus Potts, that I’m late for the chores.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know. I’m at the end of my tether, what with Mister Canning in one of the morgue’s ice chests somewhere waiting for someone to claim him and pay and the police won’t wait forever – there’s a limit! And on top of that I do not know what to do with you. Start getting the table set for tea.’

  ‘I’ll just change my clothes, Missus Potts. Be back in a jiffy. Have you got any sticking plaster?’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I got a blister on my toe from the learning.’

  ‘You got a what from what? O, for the sake of the gods, Angel, get on with it. You know where the first aid is.’

  ‘Did you happen to see dear Mister Daisyfield today, Missus Potts?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I didn’t think so,’ Angel said with her feline grin.

  Before the next Sunday, the Bay Sunday, the aunts’ house and tram Sunday, Angel carefully cleaned her ‘going out dress’ and when Missus Potts was doing her mean shopping in the village, she ironed it. She oiled her sandals (this time size five-and-a-half) and when the great Sunday arrived she was ready – cleaned, scrubbed and dressed for the best day of her week.

  ‘Well, look at you!’ said the tram driver, sounding like the guard at the gallery. ‘What’s happened to you?’

  ‘A friend bought me the clothes. The aunts haven’t seen them yet.’

  ‘They’ll be surprised, for sure. You’ll have to get a better purse than that rag bag you carry.’

  ‘No. I like it the way it is.’ Angel had decided never to wear lipstick again or flaunt her developments. She had decided she didn’t need to. Age, she supposed.

  ‘You’re a pretty little thing – one day you’re going to knock them dead,’ said the driver. ‘I’m glad you don’t wear that red goo all over your face anymore – better without it.’

  Angel ignored curious glances from others and looked, as she always did, to the right of her seat, hoping to see the heart and the arrow and B and K, but she never saw them again.

  ‘There used to be a carving on the seat next to one I once sat on – B and K, a heart and an arrow. They loved each other. Does anyone know what happened to them?’ she asked the passengers. But there was silence from some and newspapers rattled in the hands of others and windows were slid up or down.

  ‘Don’t worry, love. They just don’t understand.’

  ‘I just hope they’re not dead.’

  ‘No, love, they won’t be dead, B and K. They’ll be going to dances and having a great time.’

  ‘That’s no way to talk to a child!’ a woman shouted. She had a stinking cabbage in her bag.

  ‘Begging your pardon, ma’am, but better than no talk at all.’

  Angel was silent for a while. The tram was not. It hurtled like a drum roll and swayed over its rails on the downhill run before the climb through the high eastern suburbs to the sandstone cliffs, the ocean and the Bay. There was an
end-of-summer humidity in the air and the sky was clouded with it. As they neared the top of the cliffs she could see that Mariana, to the right of the tram, looked grey and sluggish with not a ship in sight. And to the left, beyond the park, dinghies and sail boats with not a sail in sight see-sawed up and down on their play waves and pointed east.

  It was a doldrums Sunday and gulls, without a breeze beneath their wings, hopped like landlubbers from one rubbish tin to another and picked their way through chips and bait. Angel tried to ignore the gloom and hummed whatever was in her head and chuckled to herself. After all, it was Sunday and nothing could spoil that. At the terminus the driver said goodbye to Angel and wished her a happy day with her aunts.

  ‘I’m glad you’ve made friends, love – mind how you go.’

  ‘But I have another friend, too,’ Angel said to the driver but loud enough for anyone else to hear. ‘He’s from England and he’s a genius. He sees everything in numbers. One day I’ll bring him to the aunts’ house. I know they’ll like him – Elsa, anyway.’

  ‘Off you go, then.’ And when the last passenger had gone, the driver rolled a cigarette, moved to a front seat and pulled his cap down over his face.

  Angel was anxious to show the baby shop lady the new Angel who, apart from the sticking plaster over her toes, looked very smart, but another woman told her the lady she’d come to see was in bed with the ’flu and asked if she could help Angel with a purchase. Just the thought of being seen as a potential buyer was almost too much of a pleasure and Angel laughed and clapped her hands.

  ‘I’m sorry my friend is sick,’ she said. ‘Could you tell her Angel Martin called and could you tell her that she looked very nice but had to wear the five-and-a-half sandals on account of the blisters.’

  ‘I’ll do that,’ said the woman and watched Angel as she ran from the shop and across the park towards Brooklyn Street.

  ‘A strange one, that girl.’

  Angel smiled at the prospect of surprise when she arrived at the aunts’ house in her new clothes. She’d washed and ironed and polished everything within an inch of her wardrobe’s life. The sandals, five-and-a-half, were more comfortable, if not a little loose.

  Outside the aunts’ house the gate was closed but not locked. Angel had begun to think of the gate, its locks, latches, openings and closures, as sorts of signals for what she might expect inside. She suspected Aunt Elsa was the gatekeeper. Locked, trouble. Opened a crack, take care. Closed tight on its latch but not locked? Angel had not experienced this one and opened the gate onto the drive with great care. The house, the shrubs and their borders were as still as the humid air that hung like a blanket all over the Bay. There was not a note of music to be heard from ‘up’ and the only sound from ‘down’ was a rattling and frequent cough. Angel guessed that at least Elsa was in the house. She crept through the laundry and tip-toed through the hall, towards the waterfront where she found Elsa cleaning the brass taps over the kitchen sink.

  ‘What are you doing here again?’ Elsa did not look well. Her lips were cracked and dry and her face had a thin, papery look. ‘Clara’s not here.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Then why did you come?’

  ‘It’s Sunday.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know … one … day from the … next,’ Elsa managed between coughs. ‘You’re wearing new clothes – where did that lot come from?’

  ‘A friend gave them to me.’

  ‘I don’t want to … know.’

  ‘Do you like my new clothes, Elsa?’

  ‘Yes … yes, little girl … I like them.’

  ‘I’m not little, Elsa. If you lie down and rest I’ll make you some tea.’

  ‘I can make it myself.’

  ‘I don’t think you’re very well, Aunt Elsa.’

  ‘I’m as well as I’ll ever be.’

  ‘Where’s Clara?’

  ‘Went out … said she couldn’t stand the coughing … but I can’t help it.’

  Angel thought it strange for Elsa to be polishing taps over a sink full of dishes to be washed and more dishes than Angel thought necessary for two aunts – unless of course there’d been more people in the house since her last visit. Angel hoped it had not been Jessie or any of her pack hunting for money.

  ‘It’s piled up … the dishes. I couldn’t get to them.’

  ‘I’ll do the dishes, Elsa. I’ll put the kettle on and I’ll do the dishes.’

  ‘You’ll get your dress dirty—’

  ‘I can wash it.’

  And Elsa turned suddenly and almost fell. Angel remembered the terrible time the symphony in her head made her ill. Nobody should have to go through that, Angel whispered to Angel.

  ‘Do you hear anything in your head, Elsa?’ It was just a thought.

  ‘What are you … talking about?’

  After all the Sundays in the aunts’ house, Angel had only gradually become aware of the way Elsa was treated. ‘Married to Clara’s brother dying of the drink but it was the domestic in me that made it worse,’ Elsa had once confided to Angel.

  The dishes in the sink were at least a last-Sunday old. Squashed peas, gravy stuck like glue, prawn heads, spat-out bones and gristle. The washing up looked a bit like a Missus Potts’s feast and it made Angel laugh. She tied a tea towel around her waist and stood on a butter box to make the job easier.

  ‘I would like some hot tea, Angel, with honey in it.’ And Elsa, with the weakest smile, submitted to kindness and went to her bed, wheezing through thick breath. Angel’s tea and honey at least eased her cough for a while.

  ‘Where did Clara go?’

  ‘Who knows.’

  ‘Was she wearing her moon hat?’

  ‘She never goes outside without it.’

  ‘I wish I knew why Clara is always so miserable. How can she be with all her music?’

  Elsa was quiet for a moment.

  ‘One day – one day,’ she said, ‘I might take you to the park. You like stories, don’t you?’

  ‘O, yes,’ said Angel Martin.

  Clara

  ‘She was very beautiful. Clara was beautiful and musical and she could dance – O, how she could dance – so talented. Sometimes I would watch her dance; in secret, you understand. She didn’t like to be watched but I swear her toes never touched the floor.’

  It was two Sundays since Elsa had been alone in the aunts’ house with her cough and the piled dishes and the polished taps and tea with honey. Elsa had packed sandwiches in a paper bag and she and Angel sat on a park seat behind a fig tree. She wore her moon hat as Clara did when they were out of doors but because of the very small size of Elsa’s head it flopped down to her brows. The eleven o’clock sun picked its way through the leaves of the giant fig tree and splintered the straw here and there with tiny lights so that Angel thought Elsa looked very nice and she said so.

  ‘I feel much better, now.’ And she took Angel’s hand and patted it and Angel, who had not been touched in that way since her mother, was forced to dam her tears. She had to. She couldn’t look into Elsa’s eyes.

  ‘Clara wanted to know why you and I went off together – she was suspicious.’

  ‘What did you tell her, Aunt Elsa?’

  ‘I told her I was too weak to walk alone and that you should make yourself useful while you’re here eating us out of house and home!’ And Elsa laughed at having the cheek and the courage to mimic her sister-in-law, down-at-the-mouth and grim everywhere else.

  ‘I love you, Aunt Elsa.’ Angel laughed too. ‘When you get really old I will look after you.’

  ‘Jessie said we’ll have to go into a home when she sells up!’

  ‘I won’t let her. Brooklyn Street is your home.’

  ‘What could you possibly do? Your grandfather left everything to her and her family. Now he’s dead and what can we do?’


  ‘So, I’ll tell you what I think. I think that Jessie killed him, Aunt Elsa. Jessie killed the old man with a stroke and not my mother or my father or the bike club – that’s what I think – that Jessie and her lot! The old cow!’

  ‘Angel!’ And Aunt Elsa adjusted her moon hat to an angle that was shadowed and all the tiny lights stopped. ‘You’re a child. You mustn’t say such things.’

  ‘I’m not a child and I never have been. And I’ll tell that Jessie if I have to. Aunt Elsa, she slapped you!’

  ‘It was an accident.’

  ‘It was not – I saw what happened.’

  Not far from where they sat, along the beach walk, was a white shed at the end of a jetty with small yachts all around it. Young men in white shirts or no shirts at all fussed with the yachts, the timber, the brass – the sails were rolled and hidden …

  ‘Look,’ said Elsa, pointing. ‘Your father used to belong to that club. Eighteen-footers – they used to race all the time before the Japanese. That’s where he met your mother. She was sitting on the beach, watching. Your mother told me that he ran to her, drew a heart in the sand with an arrow through it, asked what her name was and then he said he wanted her to be his girlfriend. Romantic, don’t you think, Angel?’

  Angel glanced at the boatshed and immediately thought of B and K carved into the tram seat and despite her dreams she knew then that the tram seat’s heart and arrow would not have worked out well, either. She tried not to think of her mother and father and she tried not to think of B and K.

  ‘You were going to tell me about Clara.’

  ‘Yes, I expect it’s getting late.’ She glanced at her wrist but there was no watch. ‘Well, where were we?’

  ‘Her dancing.’

  ‘Clara was very tall when she was young. She was too tall to join a company, or so they said. She was heartbroken, but after a while she decided she would teach. Clara lived downstairs in those days. She painted a room black – even the floorboards, I don’t know why. Then she had a barre installed – do you know what that is, Angel?’