The Aunts’ House

by Elizabeth Stead

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘And she advertised locally for students. Children who wanted to be dancers. After a while Clara had to turn people away. Her ballet school was very popular and that was the start of it all.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘There was a man. He brought his little girl to class and he told Clara his wife had just died of TB and couldn’t she just fit his daughter into the class. I think she was smitten there and then. Clara told me how sorry she was for the girl’s father and she’d fit her in somehow. He brought his daughter every Tuesday and one day he asked Clara if she would go out with him. Well, we were both a lot younger then and I hadn’t been long married but I knew she was head-over-heels with this man. He was good-looking, fair-haired like her father and I don’t think she’d ever been out with a man before. I can’t remember his name. I remember the little girl’s name was Jessica and Clara fussed around her as if the girl was her own. She was about eight, I think.’

  ‘Try to remember the man’s name, Elsa. If you can remember Jessica then you must remember her dad’s name. I could listen to stories all day. It’s like being at the pictures.’

  ‘David – it was David. There. It was David and he’d told Clara he was going to marry her. He wanted her to move in to a little flat in the city but I think she was too scared to move away from home.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Everything happened! One day at the Bay shops she had Jessica with her and a woman came up to them and said to the girl, “Hello, Jilly” and Clara said she was wrong and her name was Jessica and the woman said, “This is Jilly Barton – they live opposite the lighthouse. I know the Bartons. She’s a bit slow – nice of you to look after her – How are you, Jilly? Not at school today?” And the child said, “Mister Levi takes me to the lady’s place for dancing. I like dancing.” Poor, poor Clara. He broke her heart.’

  ‘What did she do?’

  ‘She asked the woman if she knew who Mister Levi was. And Jessica – or Jilly or whoever she was – called the man Uncle David. Jessica went to a special school and this Uncle David convinced them to let him borrow the child for a few hours every week for dancing lessons. This David Levi gave a Glebe address and poor Clara, as sick as she was by then, went to the address where she found out David Levi was David Hardy and lived four doors down with his sister, his wife and three children. I thought it was really brave of her to do that. Clara was distraught and she became very ill. She had a sort of breakdown and she got worse because she was afraid to tell her father. I told her she should report that man to the police but by then she’d just locked herself in her room to grieve. All the dancing classes had to be cancelled and things got so bad with Clara that I went to the police myself.’

  ‘O, Elsa.’

  ‘It turned out that David Levi – Hardy – or whoever he really was, had wives all over the place. The police said he was the worst bigamist in Sydney. Do you know what a bigamist is, Angel?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘It’s someone who’s already married and marries other women. He had a way with him and women fell for him, hook, line and sinker. That’s what happened to Clara. She’s hated men ever since and she’s always hated children – except your father. He was the baby of the family and I think she saw him as the only decent little male alive. Now do you understand, Angel?’

  ‘But why does Clara hate me, Aunt Elsa?’

  ‘Because you’re a child, I suppose. There’s a reason …’

  ‘What? What have I done?’

  ‘Nothing – nothing! There’s another reason and – well, I don’t know if I should be telling you …’

  ‘Please, Elsa.’

  ‘That terrible man, well, Clara was pregnant with his baby … I don’t know why I’m telling a child such things – you won’t understand …’

  ‘O, but I do, Elsa. I know about having babies. But where is it?’

  ‘She – well, Clara had to be rid of it – before it was born. There! What sort of a person am I, telling such things to a child … How can you possibly understand?’

  ‘I think I do. There was a woman in the boarding house, a casual. She had to go to the sanitarium because her baby died inside her … Was it like that?’

  ‘Something like that, Angel. So maybe you can understand why Clara doesn’t like children.’

  ‘Yes, I think so. O, poor Clara. And poor you, Aunt Elsa.’

  ‘I do my best but she’s terribly hard to live with. Well, anyway, there you have it. That’s the story of Clara and you want to watch yourself when you get older.’

  ‘I’m experienced, Aunt Elsa, let me tell you. I know how to look after myself.’

  Angel was experienced in her way but when the story of Clara was explained she knew there must be a hundred more experiences and lives to understand. Another death. Like all the different deaths she’d known, not one like another as there were lives not one like another. But there was an understanding. Clara as bitter as the hatred and acid in her blood corroding her being in every way possible. And Elsa knowing her place at the ladder’s bottom rung ready to catch others when they fell. Angel was reminded of Clara’s indifference to the drowning man and for a moment wondered if she would have reacted the same way if it had been Mister Canning floating past the rocks in his ballooning cardigan – or Mister Daisyfield waving his long, bony fingers.

  ‘But Aunt Elsa, you’re all right, aren’t you?’

  ‘I’m farm-bred, Angel, I’ve got to be all right. But I tell you, I’m getting tired now – old and tired. I’ve been through some bad times. It doesn’t seem that long ago I was getting the eggs in for breakfast and murdering chooks for the pot. I churned butter in a wooden tub and drank milk out of a cow’s teat. You could have grown a crop on me in the rain, I was so country, and then I was out chasing locusts when the sun burned down. I’m a domestic servant who knows her place, Angel, tough as hide. I take the little bit of good with the bad, I have to …’

  ‘You’re better than any one of them in Brooklyn Street, Elsa.’

  ‘I know Clara needs me but there’s not much more. There’s no love in that house. No wonder the paint’s cracking off.’

  ‘I love you, Aunt Elsa.’

  Elsa reached for Angel’s hand again and drew closer to her.

  ‘I know you do. It’s nice to have a friend, even one that’s not right in the head.’ And she laughed.

  ‘I’m getting better. There’s a man, Barnaby Grange, in the boarding house. He’s from England and he’s going to teach me the numbers of colours and I’m going to teach him all about the music inside me.’

  ‘O, Angel! Good God!’

  ‘It’s true. We went to the art gallery in town and he sketched a whole painting, as big as a wall, all in numbers. They thought he was mad but I think he’s a genius.’

  ‘O, Angel … We’d better get going. You’ll miss your tram. And don’t tell anyone about Clara. All the things I told you have to be our secret.’

  ‘I’d do anything for you, Aunt Elsa.’

  Mariana

  As soon as Angel reached the boarding house at the bottom of Duffy Street she ran to her room and changed her clothes. She slid the five-and-a-half sandals under the bed, put on her old dress and hung the good one to air, then carefully folded it. Before she laid it in her small cupboard she pressed it to her face and breathed the smell of the Bay and its park, a fig tree, a salted air, but most of all the smell of Elsa. She put the back of the hand that Elsa had touched to her cheek, and for that moment there was peace. Even the music inside her was quiet – no more than strings and a flute floating to her in a dream.

  Inside the door of Angel’s cupboard was a collection of family pictures cut from newspapers and magazines. Angel had sketched small portraits of herself and had pasted the sketches in the centre of each family group. The cupboard door was her secr
et. The families were her secret families. She did not have a picture of Elsa or Clara but made a space for them for the future. In the meantime, a small sketch of Angel Martin was pasted there, ready. When Elsa and Clara were truly her family, Angel would be ready.

  ‘Angel! Where are you?’

  ‘I’m here. I’m in my room,’ Angel shouted from her broom cupboard.

  ‘You’re late! Get down here and help with the table for tea – and there’s an extra tonight.’

  When Angel arrived downstairs she asked, ‘Who’s the extra, Missus Potts?’ Angel turned the table sheet over but found the stains worse on the other side. ‘Is there a clean sheet?’

  ‘No, it got wet on the line. Get a chair from the kitchen and get the chops out of the ice chest and one potato each and there’s peas I had to shell myself, you not being here.’

  ‘It’s Sunday.’

  ‘And aren’t you the lucky one. It’s never a Sunday for me.’

  Angel smiled a little and thought of Elsa and poor Clara and for that matter, B and K, carved into the tram seat – she often thought about them. She put pepper and salt shakers over the worst of the egg yolks.

  ‘Do you want me to get some mint from under the tap? I can make mint sauce.’

  ‘O, la-de-da, look who’s talking luxuries. No, we serve what the war allows. People are suffering enough without mint sauce.’

  ‘Mint sauce is free if you grow it. Who’s the extra, Missus Potts? You didn’t say.’

  ‘Her name’s Winifred Varnham. She’s here from the country while her sister has treatment in the sanitarium. Tall. Early fifties. Wears her hair in a bun on top with a chopstick through it like the Japanese. She sounds like an educated lady so you watch yourself, girl.’

  Tea (though Barnaby Grange whispered in words to Angel that his mummy would have called it ‘high tea’) was at six-thirty sharp, and on the table with the technicolour sheet sat the big enamel teapot, cups and saucers – chipped – bread on a board with a saw to cut it, two jars of berry jam short of extra sugar coupons, and an assortment of plates, each with a mutton chop, a devilled kidney, a potato and a small pile of little round pea bullets turned grey. And all of it a sore sight for eyes. Angel could see that the colours were all wrong for the plates and her music sadly adjusted itself to them.

  The permanents and the casuals wandered in and sat in a boredom that had lost its appetite. Slowly, they chose their usual chairs.

  ‘My chop’s very small,’ said a brave casual.

  ‘There’s a war on in case you haven’t noticed. We have to take what we can get. Sacrifices – that’s what it’s all about – sacrifices.’

  ‘It’s a lot to pay for a sacrificed chop!’

  ‘And mine’s cold!’ declared a late-comer.

  ‘Late’s not my fault, Mister Joseph!’ said Missus Potts, sweet as a blade.

  At exactly six forty-five, a tall lady dressed in a purple robe, grey hair in a pagoda bun with a chopstick through it and a red scarf around her shoulders that almost touched the floor, strode into the dining room. She carried two billy cans – one in each hand. Everyone was quiet, even Missus Potts, and silently watched.

  The woman, who Angel thought must have been the new casual, Winifred Varnham, sat without a word in a vacant chair, scraped the chop, the kidney and its potato and pea bullets onto her bread and butter plate and emptied the contents of the billy cans onto her dinner plate. There was a sort of curry in one can and rice in the other and Missus Potts’s boarders looked on with their mouths gaping in disbelief (except for Mister Joseph, whose lower jaw streamed dribble of Niagara proportions). The casual with the small chop grabbed the woman’s discards.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing, Miss Varnham? Brought-ins not allowed here!’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Black market! And you never know what’s in it.’

  ‘Missus Potts,’ the Lady replied, ‘I am not sure how long I will be with you but if you expect me to eat anything resembling what you have served tonight you will have to review your “no brought-ins” rule at the earliest possible time.’ The Lady looked around the table and smiled.

  ‘Good evening. My name is Winifred Varnham. Miss. How do you do?’ Nods all round and noses twitching.

  ‘All the better for the smells from those pots,’ said Mister Joseph, still salivating. ‘You wouldn’t be thinking of offering your hand in marriage, no questions asked?’

  ‘No! I certainly would not!’

  ‘Then tell us what’s in those cans and give me a bit of the sauce for this old chop and I’ll die happy.’

  ‘Ungrateful man! And me doing my best in a war.’

  Not well said, thought Angel. Missus Potts launched her words like torpedos.

  ‘O, do be quiet, Missus Potts. I’ll be paying you well. This is a fruit and sausage curry and rice – best I could do at short notice. The bus to the train ran over a chicken so there might have been chicken but it was too late to pluck.’

  Angel was fascinated. And so, it seemed, from his expression, was Barnaby Grange. Winifred Varnham was music and colour and numbers all wrapped in purple and red. Around the table was a mouth-watering silence and all eyes – all fourteen of them – moved in a glaze from mutton and spuds to curry and rice as though they were having a dream.

  And Missus Potts? Seeing the strict order of things disturbed by an aroma – with a foreign smell to it – left the table with a plate piled with leftovers never touched and went to the kitchen where, it was thought, she would pull herself together and remind herself that she was, after all, the owner of the establishment and a cut above them all! What, she wondered, was wrong with the curried sausages she’d made three weeks earlier?

  It was Winifred Varnham who broke the silence. She spoke to Angel.

  ‘What are you doing here, child?’

  ‘I’m an orphan – and I’m not a child.’

  ‘So, Missus Potts is not related? I didn’t think so. There’s no resemblance at all. You’re very thin. Pass your plate.’

  ‘O, yes, please.’ And Winifred scraped a little of her curry and rice onto it. There was hope in the eyes of the diners but the billy cans were empty.

  ‘It’s deeeelicious,’ said Angel. ‘There’s apple and raisins?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And sausage and sauce and something crunchy.’

  ‘Nuts,’ said Winifred. ‘What do you do? What is your name?’

  ‘Angel.’ For some reason she left the Martin to rest in peace. ‘I go to the local school—’

  ‘When she feels like it!’ Missus Potts emerged from the kitchen having regained, she thought, a little authority by not wearing her apron and running a wet comb through her hair. ‘Not a week goes by without the school knocking at the door!’

  ‘I don’t learn anything at school. I learn on Sundays when I ride in the trams to the aunts’ house, and some other days in the art gallery, and from my books and there’s always music playing inside me.’ Angel saw Barnaby Grange lift his head for a moment from his notebook and nod. ‘And that man there’s Mister Grange – he teaches me numbers and I teach him my music and we talk about colours and one day I discovered Mariana and—’

  ‘What is Mariana?’

  ‘The ocean.’ Angel, suddenly wound up like a top, spinning words at great speed. ‘I think the ocean is a nation not like ours and I named it Mariana.’

  ‘After the trench?’

  ‘So, you know about it, too – you don’t think I’m mad? I’ve read all about it. Mister Grange hasn’t been there yet but he will be able to do the measurements.’ Angel felt comfortable talking to Winifred Varnham. She felt she could tell the woman anything and would not be thought a fool. ‘You can come too, if you want. Do you like trams?’

  ‘Excellent transport, trams! I would like to see Mariana very much indeed, Angel, and I wo
uld be honoured to have Mister Grange accompany us – excellent! I’m already quite excited by it all. Are you not proud, Missus Potts, to have a budding genius in your house?’

  ‘Meaning no disrespect to you, Miss Varnham, she might be a genius to you but she’s mad as a cut snake to me and no end of trouble. I took her in because of her mother, whose name was Martin in case you’re wondering, and that’s the start and end to it. In the same sanitarium, her mother was, and how’s your sister? Is she getting any worse?’ Potts asked hopefully.

  ‘My sister thinks her spine is broken but it is not and she thinks she cannot walk but of course she can, and that is why she is in the sanitarium in the care of excellent people who are trying to convince her otherwise.’

  ‘The girl’s mother died in that place. I was there.’ In a hiss of a whisper that Angel heard perfectly well.

  ‘O, dear, I am so sorry to hear that. Do you think we could have a fresh pot of tea, Missus Potts?’

  ‘I’ll see what I’ve got left. Tea doesn’t grow on trees, you know. There’s a war on! It’ll be extra.’

  ‘Thank you, Missus Potts,’ said Winifred with a wave of her hand and fingers that held an exhibition of silver rings. ‘And do try not to touch the cold sore on your lip. A scratch will only make it worse.’

  ‘I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about. That’s a mozzie bite!’

  ‘Of course it is, Missus Potts – but the same advice applies.’

  On the front of Missus Potts’s dress, a large size on account of her bosoms, was an outline and a patch of cleanliness where the ever-present apron and its bib had been. Angel was not sure if the Potts apron, a gallery of stains old and new, was worse than the eggy sheet on the table but all of a sudden she felt shame as though the whole thing was her fault.

  The other diners, having picked at their scraps, began to move to their rooms slow as dairy cows – all except Barnaby Grange who’d been asked to stay a while. Winifred Varnham, it seemed, was most intrigued and not once but three times stimulated her scalp under the bun with her chopstick. Barnaby stayed in his place, being somewhat intrigued himself, but said nothing in words and concentrated on the figures in his notebook while Winifred Varnham chatted and Angel listened.