The Aunts’ House

  ‘He’ll see you,’ said Elsa. ‘Don’t do anything silly, Angel.’

  ‘He won’t see me. I know where to hide – please?’

  ‘Just for a minute, darling. And be nice about it. You don’t want to frighten the poor man.’ Winifred Varnham, in her power red robe, stood close to Jessie, ssshhh’d and put a finger to her lips.

  Uncle George stood so straight in the sitting room he could have been something bronzed in a town square. He stood with his hat in his hands and gazed out of the small window at nothing at all. Angel had tip-toed to the room’s side door, held the handle so it wouldn’t move, and peeped through the crack. She hardly breathed. The spotless glass allowed a shaft of dusted light from the sun to shine upon him like a spotlight on an opera singer waiting for him to sing. He was all bones and angles with very short grey hair – he looked strangely alien in the dark room, like a man dreaming of the sea.

  Uncle George was not at all the uncle Angel had expected. In her books about families, particularly those written by Charles Dickens, uncles were usually elderly, fairly short, well-fed, whisky-and-watered men, with bellies and watch chains and round, good-humoured heads with cheeks the colour of claret and veins. This Uncle George, grey-suited in a corner of Elsa’s dark sitting room, was not like that at all. Skinny as a stick, tall as a wardrobe, waistcoat with buttons that shone when the light touched them that Angel thought could have been pearl, but no watch chain that she could see. His shoes, even in the gloom, Angel could see were polished within an inch of their lives and he held his hat across his trousers as though he didn’t want anyone to see his other buttons.

  His face was, as far as his niece could see, unblemished and kindly and gave no clue to his age. She couldn’t see his hands very well and could not have said what his fingers were like. A most unusual uncle, Angel thought. She considered greeting him before the others came – she considered it but knew Elsa and Winifred would disapprove. She could hear footsteps on the lino and knew she mustn’t – it would be wrong – the others would be disappointed – she mustn’t, she mustn’t – it would be cheating …

  ‘How do you do?’ Not helping herself. ‘How do you do?’ From the threshold of the door, ignoring considerations and disapproval and greeting Uncle George in her experienced voice. ‘I’m Angel.’ And Uncle George, as though he had been wound up like a toy and frightened out of his dreams, spun towards her voice, dropped his hat, lost his balance and fell into the chair next to Elsa’s sewing basket.

  ‘Well, well – O, my, O, my!’ exclaimed the uncle. ‘Of course you are. Angel. Of course you are. Unexpectedly and out of nowhere … How do you do? Well, well, there you are … Here we are … and my next trick is …’ And he laughed, stood up, and threw his hat in the air and caught it, and spun full circle on his toes. ‘But I like surprises – gets the blood moving. So, how do you do, Angel Martin?’

  ‘Okay, thank you. Sorry I frightened you but it was funny. You’re funny. I bet you can do card tricks.’

  ‘No – no card tricks but I can swallow small potatoes whole. You can watch them going down past the Adam’s apple – a bit like sword swallowing, I suppose. And you didn’t frighten me. I was delightfully surprised,’ said Uncle George with an old-fashioned bow.

  Angel was delighted, too. Uncle George seemed to be just as jolly as a Charles Dickens uncle despite the fact that he was tall and skinny enough to be a bean stake in a garden.

  Then suddenly the sitting room was full of women. Barnaby Grange stood behind them. Aunt Clara, worn out after her performance with Gypsies somewhere in Andalucía, joined the others because, after all, it was an historic occasion.

  ‘I wish Peggy was here,’ Clara said and she turned to Jessie. ‘I wish she was here to see the old house used as it was before certain people moved it to misery.’

  ‘It’s a roof over your head, Clara, and don’t forget it!’ Jessie hissed low as an asp but the group seemed undisturbed by the exchange.

  ‘So!’ declared the duchess, widely smiling. ‘I see we are too late for an introduction.’

  Angel had rehearsed in her mind a hundred ways of greeting an uncle she had no idea existed, but after creeping up the hall for a sneak viewing, not one of the hundred ways did she use. Then on cue, after Uncle George’s one-man show, everyone was in the sitting room laughing as though it was the beginning of a play. Even Clara. Even Barnaby. Uncle George, with his mouth so widely open, laughed out loud and clearly revealed teeth that did, according to Jessie, run in the family – upper and lower small, sharp and neatly spaced.

  ‘There!’ she said, pointing. Jessie had not laughed with the others in the true sense of laughter but had made a cracked lip bleed in the brief moment she’d stretched it. ‘I can smell something burning,’ she said to frighten Elsa and put herself in a familiar realm of authority.

  Uncle George was introduced to Winifred and Barnaby. He seemed to be most impressed by the Duchess of Nullabri. He bowed low and swept his hat in his old-fashioned way.

  ‘I must say, Madam, that you look positively regal.’

  ‘Of course,’ the duchess said with a nod and a smile. ‘And thank you.’

  Jessie stabbed Winifred with a glance.

  ‘Lunch won’t be long,’ said an unusually relaxed Elsa, as though she’d been nipping the cooking sherry.

  ‘I’ll help you, Elsa, dear. It smells delicious,’ said Winifred.

  ‘We’ll have to eat it picnic-style, outside on the grass. I baked a leg of saltbush hogget – two-tooth, so it should be tasty. There’s a treat! The butcher and I get along … so, anyway … it’s a nice day and there’s the harbour and the gulls and the odd ferry from Circular Quay. It’s nice at the Bay on Sundays, Mister Wolf.’

  ‘Wolf? Uncle George Wolf?’ said Angel. ‘I never heard my mother tell me a name. Maybe I don’t remember. Was that my mother’s name?’

  ‘Yes, Angel.’

  ‘He’s a Jew!’ Jessie said in a voice she would use to describe a man with three balls hanging outside his shop door.

  ‘We have a lot to talk about, Angel. It’s been too long – you must have wondered – and look at you – there’s a niece to be proud of.’

  ‘Are you really my mother’s brother?’

  ‘Yes, of course. I’m afraid your mother lost touch with the family when she moved to Sydney. One of those things that happen to families, but here I am, Angel, all the way from Melbourne in the train, just to see you.’

  ‘You could have written my mother a letter. Didn’t you know where we were?’

  ‘We had an idea, but not for a long while after she left Melbourne.’

  ‘Then, if you had an idea, where were you when my mother was sick? There were trains, then.’ Click. Angel was suddenly angry and her brain moved a notch from the entertainer from Melbourne to the reality of betrayal. ‘Where were you when she was dying in the sanitarium?’

  ‘Later, Angel – please, later …’ Winifred whispered in her ear.

  ‘We didn’t know she was sick, Angel,’ said Uncle George. ‘No one told us.’

  ‘You could have found out!’ Click.

  Winifred Varnham glanced at Angel and was concerned.

  ‘Well, now, everyone. We must help Elsa with the plates.’ Winifred broke the awkward silence as only she could – taking charge with flowing robe, smiles and grand gestures. ‘Barnaby, the bowl of potatoes please and Clara, you could dance to the front grass most beautifully with the serviettes and cutlery. Jessie, could you manage the tomatoes? Yes, of course you could and I will help Elsa with the rest.’

  Jessie did what she was asked to do. It was an astonishment to Elsa but of course what Elsa could not have known was Jessie’s determination to stand firm and mark her territory until the invasion was over.

  ‘She wasn’t invited, you know,’ whispered Elsa.

  ‘Never mind.’

  �
�And what can I do?’ asked Uncle George.

  ‘Escort your beautiful niece, of course,’ said Winifred Varnham.

  Le déjeuner sur l’herbe

  During one of Angel’s ‘lost’ school day visits to the art gallery she’d lain on her side on the floor in front of a painting of a picnic. People sprawled like ancient Romans at a feast and one woman was naked. It was such a beautiful thing to see. Angel had propped herself up on an elbow and imagined she was somewhere within the frame. Even the music inside her became pastoral and gentle. It had been one of her memorable gallery experiences until the security guard who was her friend walked quickly to her side.

  ‘Get up! Get yourself up! You’ll trip someone lying there like that.’

  ‘But I love it. Tell me about it.’

  ‘Dashed if I know how you get away with nicking out of school like this. I don’t want to be mixed up in it.’

  ‘It’s easy. It’s a secret about Mister Daisyfield at the school. I’ll tell you what happened one day.’

  ‘Needn’t bother. I don’t think I want to hear about it. Mister Daisyfield – what sort of a name is that?’

  ‘Then, tell me!’ Angel had stood and pointed. ‘Tell me! Tell me!’

  ‘It’s French – painted by a bloke called Manet and it’s called – well, I can’t say it in French but it sort of means the Luncheon on the Grass.’

  On the harbourfront grass at the aunts’ house, Angel was strongly reminded of the painting even though here the grass was knee-high and weeds, looking for something to hang on to, groped through the jungle.

  ‘Shoddy.’ In word. Angel didn’t know what Barnaby meant, exactly, but imagined it was something his mother would say.

  The trees and shrubs were different in the painting and the water was not the water in the painting but a harbour, and there was no naked lady – but apart from all that, to Angel it was an Australian version of Manet’s painting. She thought she might begin another Book of the Bay but the next one would be illustrated.

  A shaded patch of ground where nothing grew served as a table for the picnic rug. Everyone was sprawled on their sides or on their backs or, like Uncle George, propped against the trunk of the flame tree. Uncle George and Barnaby Grange had taken their jackets off and had hung them on a branch. The baked hogget had been eaten and Elsa’s lemonade, sipped from glasses not used since the wedding, had been remarked upon and the group, full as googs, chatted with traces of meat and gravy and squashed peas on their lips. Jessie relaxed in her way by balancing uncomfortably on the head of a stone lion that was once a highlight of the garden. The lion, strangled by a creeper and hidden in its own patch of jungle, looked particularly miserable, Angel thought, with Jessie perched on his head like a very large crow.

  ‘Pity to see an old property go like this one,’ said Uncle George. ‘But of course, I can see it is too much for Elsa and you, Clara, to manage. If you have a mower I could do what I can with the grass.’

  ‘We pay rent for this – it used to be ours but not anymore.’ Clara threw a dart in Jessie’s direction with her eyes.

  ‘Then your landlord should surely help to care for his property. Who owns the house?’

  ‘That one, there!’ Angel pointed to Jessie like a witness in a courtroom.

  ‘And she wouldn’t lift a finger to help if her life depended on it!’ said Clara.

  ‘How dare you!’ said the crow.

  ‘O, well, there’s obviously much that is not my business – but I don’t think it would cost a great deal to clear the ground here.’ Uncle George, realising he was treading on family eggshells, smiled. ‘And whether the grass is high or low, it is beautiful here.’

  ‘I’ll take you down to the rocks later, Uncle George. Clara has named them and she’s named the tides that splash in from Mariana. I’ll show you. She’s so clever.’

  ‘What’s Mariana, Angel?’

  ‘It’s the sea nation you can see from the top of the cliffs where the tram stops and where the lighthouse is. I think it’s another country but with water instead of land. Different. I found out all about it. I can tell you about it later if you like.’

  ‘Okay. You can tell me about it later.’

  ‘I used to be scared of it, but not anymore.’

  ‘I’m pleased to hear it,’ said Uncle George. ‘I’ve never been afraid of the ocean.’

  ‘Do you live near the sea?’ Winifred asked. Angel was amazed that her friend had remained so unmarked, stainless and ‘in place’ – even though she sprawled on the ground, cool as a cucumber. But then she would, wouldn’t she …

  ‘I do indeed, Miss Varnham. Our house is in St Kilda, right by the sea, and I will tell you, Miss Varnham, that the sea is my element when I’m not working. I like to fish and I have a small boat.’

  ‘Then, what do you do, when you’re not in your element?’ asked the crow and the lion cringed.

  ‘I have a manufacturing company – a family business begun by my father. We make furniture. Bespoke, you might say, for clients of very fine taste. Very fine furniture, Madam, from prized timber from all over the world.’

  ‘Any of it from Brazil?’ Angel asked, laughing.

  ‘Yes, there has been – but not at the moment. The war has put an end to mahogany from Brazil.’

  ‘Then, I imagine you must be fairly well off?’ said Winifred. A sleepy remark she was barely aware of.

  ‘We’re not doing too badly – but the war, you know. It has affected us all. It has broken the backs of many businesses like ours.’

  ‘Do you have a family, Mister Wolf?’

  ‘My wife died eight years ago, but our two sons are comfortable in their homes – well, flats, really.’

  ‘You really don’t look old enough to have sons in homes, Mister Wolf.’

  ‘I’ll be sixty in half a year, dear lady.’

  ‘Good heavens …’ And then it was obvious that Miss Varnham was about to close her eyes.

  ‘Do your sons live in flats by the sea?’ asked Angel.

  ‘Yes, and not far from the shore. Your mother was the youngest of a large family, did you know that?’

  ‘No. My mother – your sister,’ snapped Angel in a sudden mood swing, ‘lived by the sea too but we lived in a shopfront!’ Click.

  ‘Not now, darling,’ said Winifred, who was truly only vaguely aware of the after-lunch world in the Sunday Bay. Small, winged creatures had begun to form a halo around her head.

  ‘I’m sorry, Angel. We didn’t know. I hope you’ll forgive us one day.’

  Clara stood, took her glass and a plate of leftovers for the gulls and said she was being eaten alive by grass ticks and if anyone wanted her she’d be upstairs. And a few minutes later the tranquil air of the Bay was pierced by the music of Stravinsky.

  ‘I’ll start cleaning up,’ said Elsa. Elsa had probably been saying ‘I’ll start cleaning up’ since the wedding glasses she’d used for the lemonade. Dependable, organised Elsa might well have said ‘I’ll start cleaning up’ the minute after she was born. She was able to carry four plates at a time and Angel was impressed.

  ‘I’ll help, Aunt Elsa.’

  ‘No, Angel. You must stay with your Uncle George. Take him down to the harbour and show him your favourite rocks.’

  Winifred Varnham had slipped into an elegant daydream and Jessie had become aware of Barnaby Grange. She was aware that he seemed to observe her for a longer time than she thought necessary for the notes, or whatever he was doing in a sketchpad every minute. A portrait? Yes, a portrait. What else would it be? Jessie did not say a word and did not distract Barnaby and pretended to be interested in the flame tree because, to tell the truth, she had not had such attention since the grandfather, her lover before he died, had made her a posy of kelp.

  Jessie was not to know that Barnaby, in his calculations, found the angles and points, as well as
the precise geometry of her sharp, black being, worthy of a mathematical portrait – differential geometry perhaps? though there were no curves to speak of – and then which numbers would he multiply for the woman’s particular colour black?

  ‘You can watch the tides from the rocks, too. Clara has named them all. She is very clever. It’s the music. Music and colours make you clever, did you know that? Do you want to come down to the rocks?’

  ‘Yes, I’d like that. Lead the way.’ Then Uncle George stood and Angel laughed.

  ‘There’s stains and prickles and stuff all over your clothes. You look as though you’ve been picking blackberries in the gully.’

  ‘I know about the boarding house and the gully, Angel. Elsa told me. You live in two worlds, don’t you? Do you love the gully as much as the rocks and the harbour?’

  ‘I don’t know – there’s green moss and a creek in the gully and I love everything but I still suck the salt in my hair – did you know that? Some people chew their fingernails but I chew my hair. Do you think that’s mad?’

  ‘No. A bit unusual but not mad.’

  The house and the rocks viewed the world to the north-west. It was the best place to be to see the Bay, Angel thought, and like a tourist guide she pointed to the ferry wharf, the fish and chips shop next to the pub where Uncle George was staying, and the entrance to the park she had run through so many times on her way to Brooklyn Street. In the distance, families strolled along the beach walk – small as dolls – and dinghies as old as the Ark pulled up on the strip of sand, and gulls, hundreds of them, argued in flocks knowing it was leftovers time. The afternoon sun at its peak above the Bay made light harbour swells drape here and there with the colours of shot taffeta, and a breeze from Mariana had moored water craft all over the place turning their noses in a certain direction. There were posh boats dressed in white, like virgins, next to battered old fishing boats dressed like tramps, and gulls pissing on one and not the others.

  ‘I think we’re sitting on Humperdink. It’s my favourite rock. Do you like it here, Uncle George?’