‘Many Africans live in mud huts,’ my aunt told me, ‘and do their washing in the river – without the benefits of soap powder.’
‘How terrible,’ I said.
Elaine tried to reach the top of the wall, and fell far short. Glynis disappeared from my view for a moment, then re-appeared pushing the wheelbarrow. Elaine stood on it. She still wasn’t tall enough. She pointed to something outside my range of vision, and Glynis vanished again.
‘Is it any wonder they worship false idols when they do not even have the price of a tin of Huntley and Palmer’s Tea Time Assorted in their pockets?’ my aunt droned on.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t suppose it is.’
Glynis returned with an old watering can, and placed it on its side in the barrow.
‘That won’t hold!’ I screamed telepathically. ‘That won’t hold!’
My message went unheard. Elaine stepped on the watering can and, when it collapsed, fell arse over tit onto the lawn.
‘We must encourage the poor black heathen to spend towards Jesus,’ my aunt said.
‘Oh God,’ I prayed silently, ‘even if you are the god Aunt Catherine thinks you are, help me now. Don’t let her turn around. Don’t let her see what’s going on in the garden.’
Elaine had stood up, and dusted herself off. She didn’t look any the worse for her fall. Glynis had replaced the watering can with a couple of seed boxes and, standing on them, already had one leg cocked over the wall. Then she was gone – and a few seconds later, so was Elaine.
‘Never again,’ I promised myself.
I had nearly disgraced myself in Aunt Catherine’s eyes, and I needed to stay in her good books, at least for a while – because I was rapidly running out of aunts.
****
The rest of the details of the girls’ odyssey were related to me later – rather coldly – by Elaine.
Having landed in the garden of 146 Llandaff Street, Glynis had walked boldly up to the back door, and knocked loudly.
‘We’s girl guides,’ she announced to the surprised householder who answered the door.
‘But what are you doing in my back garden?’ the man demanded.
‘We’s on one of them whatsit tests,’ Glynis told him.
‘Initiative tests,’ Elaine supplied.
‘That’s right,’ Glynis agreed. ‘We was supposed to be hikin’ in the Brecon Beacons, wasn’t we? Only we seems to have got lost. So if you’ll just let us go through your house, like, we’ll try again. Right?’
‘Right,’ said the man, who, according to Elaine, was looking a little shell-shocked by this time.
‘And if you tells anybody about this,’ Glynis said to Elaine, as they stepped out into the street, ‘I swears to God I’ll cut your heart out.’
‘That goes double for me,’ Elaine replied. ‘With knobs on!’
****
In a way, I’m glad Glynis’ intervention ended my affair with Elaine even before it had really got started. She’d never have satisfied me. I still yearned for the womanly embrace of Mrs Cynthia Harrap, you see, and even if Elaine had been willing to take up Glynis’ suggestion of a threesome, it could never have been as good as the beautiful music Mrs Harrap and I used to make together. Or, to put it in terms my aunt would understand, I didn’t want to swap my memories of Miracle Cynthia for two packets of ordinary women.
9
The regular work of the Mission was not enough for someone of Aunt Catherine’s enthusiasm. She lectured at WIs, she taught Sunday school classes. And here, too, I was able to help her.
Take the Sunday school classes as an example. It was my job to go to the hall an hour before the class, take the heavy, old-fashioned board and easel out of the closet, and pin up the week’s visual displays; that done, I would cover the whole thing up with a large cloth.
A few minutes later, the children would come shuffling reluctantly in, and take their places. And finally, my aunt would make her impressive entrance.
She was formidable in action, her scrawny neck thrust aggressively forward, her claw-like fingers scraping through the air as she made her point. I enjoyed all her stories, but perhaps my favourite – by virtue of its sheer ludicrousness – was The Good Shopkeeper.
‘Jesus was asked, “Who is my neighbour”,’ she’d announce, ‘and this is what He said. “There was once a man who was set upon by other men to whom he owed money. They stripped him financially naked and left him lying on the floor – for they’d re-possessed his three-piece suite, which was made of genuine leather and had real brass studs all along the top …”’
The children would sit perfectly still while she told the tale, their small hands clutching tightly at their small knees. Some appeared mesmerised, others merely terrified. But hypnotised or fearful, a look of complete incomprehension filled the eyes of each and every one of them.
‘Who, then, was the man’s neighbour?’ Aunt Catherine would ask at the end of the story.
The children would stare back blankly.
‘Was it the woman in the building society, who passed by on the other side of the counter?’
No response.
‘Was it the bank manager who would not give him an overdraft?’
Silence.
‘No, of course not. It was the Good Shopkeeper, wasn’t it? He was the one who gave the man credit.’
Not a head nodded in agreement. The children remained as frozen as they had been since the beginning. But that was about to change, for now we were reaching the climax of the proceedings. My aunt would walk over to the board and easel, grip the cloth firmly, and whip it off so dramatically that even veterans flinched, while those children new to the game would actually scream.
There it would be for all to gaze on – the whole story revealed in Pastor Ives’ lurid watercolours.
‘See!’ my aunt would demand. ‘See the man set about by creditors! See the bank manager! See the Good Shopkeeper!’
I do not wish to portray my aunt’s teaching as ineffective. It was far from that. Though the children have since grown into adults, I’m sure some of them feel a spasm of unease whenever they see the particular brand of corned beef that the Prodigal’s father opened on his son’s return home, and that even now they can’t hear the put-put sound of a Japanese motorbike without thinking of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem.
10
I looked back on my time in Norton – with the cats and Mrs Cynthia Harrap – as the golden period of my life. So it was only natural that, on occasion, I should wish it had not been necessary for Aunt Peggy to meet with her unfortunate accident. Yet what was done was done – as Mother used to say – and though I could scarcely be said to be happy with Aunt Catherine, I was quite prepared to tolerate it until I was old enough to strike out on my own.
It’s very important that you appreciate this last point. I really would have stayed with Aunt Catherine until I turned eighteen – and I in no way sought what was about to happen.
Ernest Fellstead of Tunbridge Wells was the catalyst. If only he’d bothered to seal his letter properly, events would have taken an entirely different turn. But we can’t really blame him, I suppose. How could we possibly expect him to make a decent job of gumming down the envelope flap when his hands were probably trembling nineteen to the dozen?
I noticed the flap of Ernest’s Fellstead’s letter was loose the moment I picked it up at the Post Office.
‘The fact that you could read it doesn’t make it any less private,’ Mother’s voice said in my ear.
True – but try to understand my position, Mother. Every day, I went to the Post Office and picked up seven or eight letters – business letters – for my aunt. Wasn’t it natural that I should want to know what kind of business a half-mad widow with no apparent skills could be involved in?
‘Read me! Read me!’ the letter screamed from my pocket.
‘You’ve carried hundreds of letters without yielding to temptation,’ I
told myself as I began the sharp descent to my aunt’s house. ‘Don’t give in now.’
‘What about your aunt’s “special” correspondents?’ the letter jeered. ‘Wouldn’t you like to know about them?’
I had already reached 203 Gregynog Road. I did not have to hold out for much longer. I fixed my gaze firmly on the horizon – the usual grey clouds hanging gloomily in the air, further depressing an already miserable sea – and kept walking.
‘Good boy!’ Mother encouraged.
‘Last chance!’ the letter warned.
I stopped and looked up and down the street. There was no one around. I reached into my pocket, pulled out the envelope, and removed the letter from it.
The paper was cheap and blue-lined, the writing shaky – and the message a revelation:
“Madam Cathy,
You set my pulse racing, my blood boiling. You are the queen of my heart, and though I know it can never be, I yearn for you nightly. Were it not for your precious gifts, which I hold to my cheek as I lie in bed, I could not go on.
Your affectionate slave
Ernest Fellstead (Mr)
P.S. I enclose a postal order for more of the same. I can’t get enough of you!”
Madame Cathy?
Precious gift?
I knew then, as I had known after Sergeant Fliques’ raid on Cuddles Farm, that I couldn’t let matters rest there.
****
I assumed that the key to the computer room – like the one to Diamond Peggy the Cat Abuser’s store – was hidden away, but I had no idea where, and as I stood in the living room and watched Aunt Catherine make her way down the street, I tried my best to get into her head.
Would she keep the key in her knickers’ drawer, as Aunt Peggy had done? I hoped not – because that was the last place I wanted to look.
Was it in one of her precious packets of soap powder, then? No, she would have considered that practically sacrilegious.
My eye fell on the bookcase – and on Pastor Ives’ magnum opus, The Holy Trinity: Three for the Price of Two. I removed the book from the shelf, and found the key sitting snugly behind it.
11
A large, old-fashioned oak desk dominated the computer room, and each of the objects which had been placed on it had – as in the pages of an Agatha Christie novel – its own special significance.
‘We must apply our little grey cells,’ I said to myself, in a Belgian accent which Les Fliques would no doubt have ridiculed.
At the corner of the desk was the IBM computer on which Aunt Catherine stored her list of lunatic religious organisations. Next to it lay one of the hairbrushes I had bought in Abernuffa the previous Saturday – and which was already half-bald.
Beyond the hairbrush was a tube of lipstick – bright red lipstick. Strange, since Aunt Catherine never used make-up.
‘Except for business purposes,’ I muttered to myself.
A pot of thick liquid was the next object for my attention. It looked like glue – and it was sticky enough to the touch – but it had the faint odour of fish paste.
There was only one more clue to exercise my grey cells – a curling iron with a few strands of hairbrush bristle clinging to it – but even without the letter which Aunt Catherine must have been working on just before she’d gone out, I already had a fair picture of how the racket worked.
I read the letter anyway.
“Dearest Walter,” my aunt had written,
“I, too, long for our bodies to become one, but that can never be. Instead, I will plant a kiss on this paper and imagine it is your lips.”
A bright red lipstick smudge followed.
“There is more,” the letter continued. “I will pick up this paper and imagine it to be your proud knight. Then I will place it between my legs, at the very entrance to the citadel I ache for you to storm, and I will keep it there until the juices of my passion have left their mark.”
The sticky patch below smelled faintly of fish paste.
“And more!” my aunt wrote. “Some of the thatch from that heavenly mound in which you yearn to rub your strong, masculine nose, shall be yours, too”.
A strand of bristles – hot from the curling iron – had been sellotaped underneath.
The tone changed a little in the last paragraph.
“Dear, dear Walter, I do not know how I would survive without your kind gifts. But if, perhaps, you could make your next postal order a little more substantial, I would be forever in your debt.”
There was – as my aunt had said – more. In the top desk drawer, I found a number of the kind of magazines which are only sold in adult bookshops.
‘Are these just what you advertise in, Auntie?’ I said aloud. ‘Or are they your style primers, as well?’
In the middle drawer were letters to – and from – my aunt’s clients. They were a mixed bunch, some wanting to feel Aunt Catherine’s stiletto heel pressing down on their cheeks (Aunt Catherine! Stiletto heels!), others going into grisly detail about the way in which they would punish her for her disobedience. And to give her credit where it was due, my aunt had done a good job of replying, matching the tone of her own letters perfectly to theirs.
How did I feel about what I’d discovered? I was amused rather than outraged. Mother had not disapproved of sex, and it seemed to me that Aunt Catherine was doing very little harm.
So what if she took small amounts of money under false pretences? The people she was taking it from wanted to be fooled. It could even be argued that she was performing a public service – or a pubic one, anyway – by providing a safe outlet for all the perverts and deviants who wrote to her.
Thus, I didn’t condemn her for her little racket at all – and she would have been quite safe if it hadn’t been for the pile of letters in her bottom drawer.
Some of these letters were angry, others pleading, but all of them carried the same message:
“What I’m paying you is crippling me,” one said. “The children haven’t had a holiday in three years.”
“My wife wanted to know where all the money had gone,” another man wrote. “And when I wouldn’t – couldn’t – tell her, she left me.”
“Show me a little mercy,” a third begged. “If you don’t, I swear I’ll kill myself.”
But mercy was not Aunt Catherine’s strong point. However touching the plea, each poor victim received exactly the same form letter by return of post.
“Dear ______
Whilst I find your personal situation distressing, I am afraid it would be unfair to give you special consideration over my other clients.
You have only two alternatives. Should you send me your usual charitable contribution next month, you can rest assured it will be put to a good cause. Should you fail to do so, however, I am sure your pastor at ___________ will be most interested to see some of the letters which you wrote to me, and I still have in my possession.”
****
I knew now how she chose her “special” correspondents. Understood, too, how she’d been able to put pressure on Chief Constable Hampton – a member of the Law and Order Tabernacle – to pull Les Fliques off Aunt Peggy’s case. Every time she got a new client, she’d check his name and address against the lists on her computer. If there was no match, then she’d enter into a normal business relationship, as she had with Walter and Ernest Fellstead (Mr). But if she did find a match – if the writer was a member of a religious congregation, with a position to keep up – then she had him by the short and curlies.
It only took a moment of weakness to answer Madame Cathy’s advertisement in a dirty magazine, and yet the poor soul who’d done it could find himself paying for ever.
Who knew the damage Aunt Catherine had done over the years – how many lives she’d ruined?
What a revenge on men in general for the filthy demands Uncle Reginald had made on her before he hanged himself in the privy!
What a magnificent way of living out the
doctrine of Christ the Consumer – a doctrine of unlimited, insatiable greed!
‘What should I do, Mother?’ I said.
But I had no real need to ask. I knew what Mother would want me to do – what she would have done herself, if she’d still been alive.
12
Aunt Catherine died shortly after that, and so I went to live with Aunt Sadie.
PART FIVE: The Queen of Spades
1
Aunt Sadie was standing on the platform, just as she’d promised she would be. It was seven years since I’d last seen her, but I recognised her immediately.
‘I’m sorry I didn’t come to the funeral,’ she said, standing on tip-toe to kiss me. ‘But, you know, it would have been hypocritical of me to turn up. I really loved your mother, but as for the rest of them …’
I have described Aunt Sadie before – her corn-coloured hair, deep blue eyes and translucent skin – but now I took in some details which the eyes of childhood seemed to have missed. She was wearing a light, summery dress which, though not immodest, did nothing to hide her figure. Her legs were long and slim, her waist was narrow, her breasts firm and pointed. If I’d tried to conjure up a beautiful – sexy – woman in my imagination, I could not have done any better.
Aunt Sadie laughed. ‘Have I changed that much?’ she asked.
I realised I’d been staring at her, and blushed. ‘You haven’t changed at all,’ I said.
She linked her arm through mine, and led me towards the barrier.
‘I can see I’m going to have a shameless flatterer living under my roof,’ she said.
‘It’s not flattery,’ I blurted out. ‘You really are beautiful.’
She laughed again. ‘I suppose I don’t look bad for a woman pushing middle age,’ she conceded. ‘Of course, part of the reason I’ve taken such good care of myself is that you simply had to in my line of business.’
‘What exactly was your job in France?’
A Conspiracy of Aunts Page 12