‘Entertainment.’
‘Singing and dancing?’
‘Something like that,’ my aunt said. ‘The car’s over there.’
It was a TR6 – old, but in immaculate condition. I put my cases in the boot, and climbed into the passenger seat beside my aunt. Sadie, I soon appreciated, was a good driver who, while not exactly aggressive, certainly took any advantage she could to get ahead.
‘We’ll have to get you driving lessons as soon as you’re old enough,’ she said as we shot past a heavy gravel lorry. ‘It’ll give you a bit of independence.’
Soon, we had left the town behind and were out in open countryside.
‘I hope you’ll like Shelton Bourne,’ Aunt Sadie said. ‘I hope you’ll like the cottage, too. I fell in love with it the first time I saw it and that was – oh, ages ago. When I came back from France, and saw it was for sale, I couldn’t believe my luck.’
‘When did you come back from France?’ I asked.
Aunt Sadie frowned. ‘Over a year ago – but surely, you knew that already, didn’t you?’
‘No.’
‘That’s funny. I wrote to your Aunt Catherine and said that now I was established in England again, you could come and live me with if you wanted to. Didn’t she even mention the possibility to you?’
Of course not! What master would ever give up a willing slave voluntarily? What did it matter to Catherine that I might have more chance of happiness in Shelton Bourne than in Llawesuohtihs? Someone had to collect her mail, repair the Mission and set up her lectures, didn’t they?
‘Look – here’s your new home,’ Aunt Sadie said, pulling up.
I looked – but I didn’t believe. It was an old thatched cottage, with leaded windows. Until that moment, I’d thought that such places only existed on the lids of biscuit tins. I got out of the car and walked to the gate. To my left was a rose garden, and the sweet smell of the flowers drifted across and enveloped me. To my right was the rock garden, with a small stream cascading gently over the washed stones.
‘You do like it, don’t you?’ Aunt Sadie asked anxiously.
‘It’s beautiful,’ I said.
Everything seemed beautiful that day.
Aunt Sadie led me into her oak-beamed living room.
‘You sit down over there, and I’ll make a pot of tea,’ she said. ‘Then we can talk.’
Imagine that – an aunt of mine who made pots of tea herself. And when the tea arrived, it tasted both delicious and delicate. I told my aunt so.
‘Flattery again,’ she said. ‘Well, actually, I do have it blended specially for me. It costs a little more, but then that’s true of most of the good things in life.’ She hesitated, as if she was reluctant to say what was really on her mind, then forced herself to speak. ‘It’s time to lay down the house rules,’ she told me.
‘I’ll earn my keep,’ I promised.
‘Earn your keep?’
I shrugged. ‘You know – the cleaning, the cooking, the repairs.’
‘You’ll do no such thing,’ Aunt Sadie said hotly. ‘As far as household chores go, we’ll split them. I like cooking, and I don’t mind doing the laundry. But I can’t stand washing up so, if you don’t mind, that’ll be your job. We’ll share out the cleaning between us. Does that seem fair?’
‘Very fair,’ I said, hardly able to believe my luck.
‘But there are other matters I’m going to have to be firm on,’ my aunt said ominously. ‘You’re still at school, so I’m not having you staying out until all hours of the night during the week.’
‘Aunt Sadie, I—’
‘Weekends are a different matter,’ my aunt added hastily. ‘Then, you can go and come as you choose. But if you want to entertain any friends here – and you want me out of the house – you’ll have to let me know in advance.’ She smiled uncertainly. ‘Have I started turning into the wicked stepmother already?’ she asked.
‘No,’ I said happily, ‘not at all.’
2
We ate our first dinner together on the patio. It was a warm summer evening, and the air had that balmy quality, peculiar to England, which almost makes it worth putting up with a filthy climate for the rest of the year.
Sadie, on top of all her other accomplishments, was an excellent cook, and after years of eating new, improved, mighty-meaty beefburgers at Aunt Catherine’s house, it was a pleasure to cut into a real filet mignon.
‘In the kind of entertaining I did in France, a good meal played an important part,’ Sadie told me. She laughed. ‘Sometimes, if the meal was heavy enough, it was the only part.’
‘What do you do now, Aunt Sadie?’ I asked, because, for some reason I couldn’t quite explain, it made me feel uncomfortable to talk about her time in France, and I felt the urge to change the subject.
‘What do I do now?’ Sadie repeated. ‘I suppose you could say I’m semi-retired – but I’m very active in the local preservation society.’
As I would learn later, almost everyone in Shelton Bourne was involved in the preservation society. The villagers were off-comers, by and large – retired stock brokers and people of that ilk – rootless city folk who had embraced the rural tradition with a missionary zeal.
‘There’s a lot of work to be done on preservation,’ Sadie said ominously. ‘The vultures are hovering already.’
‘The vultures?’
‘The property developers. This is prime land, close to the motorway. They’d love to get their feet in the door, and if we don’t fight back, they will. We’ve already beaten off one attack by that swine Cypher.’
Cypher. The name of Shelton Bourne’s arch-fiend was new to me then, but as time passed I was to find out more about him than I ever wanted to know.
Sir Llewellyn Cypher – Lew to his many low friends in high places – was a construction magnate and architectural philistine. His skyscraper blocks loomed darkly over the landscape as monuments to ugliness. His shopping centres were nightmares in pre-cast concrete. Almost single-handed, he had converted the Georgian hamlet of Wentwell into Wentwell New Town – Went Wrong New Town to its inhabitants – an urban jungle of flyovers which flew over other fly-overs, and underpasses which passed under other underpasses.
Had Cypher owned the Sistine Chapel, it was said, he would have plastered the ceiling, installed neon lighting, and sold it to a fast food chain. If the Amazon rain forest had been his, he would have asphalted it as quickly as it could be burned down.
Where Cypher was involved, planning regulations were brushed aside. He employed an army of lawyers who even the shysters of the profession were wary about being seen with. He kept any number of local and national environmental officials awake at night, worrying over what would happen to their mortgage repayments if he ceased to be their friend.
It would be unfair to say he would resort to anything to get his own way – he drew the line at dirty tricks he had not yet thought of. He was, in every way, a formidable opponent – and when he eventually turned his attention to Shelton Bourne, he would bring into play his full repertoire of ruthlessness and corruption.
But that night on the patio, there was no hint of the battle to come. There were, instead, two people getting to know each other, chatting about this and that, eating good food, and – in Sadie’s case – drinking a full bottle of wine.
The sun went down, and the rising moon cast a silvery glow over the remains of our feast. We listened to the chirp of the crickets, and the hoot of a passing owl. We watched the bats circling around the patio light. I felt as if I had come home at last.
Finally, towards midnight, Sadie stood up.
‘You’ve had a long day,’ she told me. ‘I think you’d better get yourself off to bed.’
Only when she’d spoken did I realise how tired I was. I rose heavily to my feet, and started to collect up the dishes.
Sadie put a restraining hand on my arm.
‘Leave that,’ she said. ‘You can star
t being Number One Washing Up Boy tomorrow. Tonight, your old auntie’s going to spoil you.’
****
I’d been in bed for about fifteen minutes, and was almost asleep, when I heard the knock on the door.
‘Come in,’ I said.
The door opened slowly – almost reluctantly – and Sadie hovered on the threshold. She was wearing a long, slinky nightdress, and the hall light behind her cast her slim, beautiful body into relief.
‘Just came to see if you’d settled in,’ she said.
She slurred her words slightly, and I realised, for the first time, that she was a little drunk.
‘I’m fine,’ I assured her.
‘You look very like him,’ she told me.
‘My father?’
‘Very like him. I could have had him, you know.’ She advanced uncertainly into the room. ‘He wanted me – badly. But I couldn’t have done it to Jennifer – to your mother. She needed him more than I did. Yet sometimes, I wish …’
She was standing by my bed now. I longed to reach up and stroke her silky hair – to wrap my arms around her smooth, white neck and pull her closer to me.
But I didn’t. My muscles tensed, my arms seemed glued to my sides, my whole body became as rigid as a corpse.
‘Do you think …?’ she asked, her voice quavering with indecision.
‘Think what, Auntie Sadie?’ I croaked.
‘Nothing. It’s nice to have you here, Rob. It really is.’
She bent over and kissed me lightly on the forehead. And then she turned, and fled stumbling from the room.
3
It was autumn. The morning air was crisper than it had been when I first arrived in Shelton Bourne, and the lawn was heavy with dew. The days were growing shorter, too, and hedgerows which had seemed so drab in the full glory of summer were now ablaze with bright red berries.
Sadie and I watched the red admirals perching gracefully on the Michaelmas daisies, their wings spread to catch the weaker sunlight.
‘They won’t last through the winter,’ Sadie said sadly. ‘It’s such a pity that beautiful things have to die.’
She had never spoken a truer word.
I was enrolled in the local secondary school by this time, and was doing as well as I chose to – which is to say just a little better than average.
Yet there was one school subject – albeit an extra-curricular one – which did catch my imagination.
Arts and Crafts!
Incredible, isn’t it, that a non-joiner like me – a boy already dominated by two obsessions – should suddenly acquire a new hobby.
And I was good at it.
‘You don’t want to be going wasting your time on Maths and History and all that rubbish,’ Mr Ferris, my metalwork teacher, told me. ‘This is where your way lies – making jewellery.’
For it was to jewellery that I devoted my newly discovered talent. Brooches, bracelets, ear rings – lovingly and patiently, I made them all. And what did I do with them once they were finished? I gave them to Sadie, of course.
Not that jewellery-making was my only interest. I was playing bridge again. My partner was a retired solicitor called Martin Lord, and together, we did the local circuit. I would soon be a Club Master, the first step on a ladder of local, regional and national promotions which would eventually lead me to the title of Grand Master. Nothing could stop me – it was only a matter of time.
And sex? As my old friend Les Fliques might say, that requires means, motive and opportunity.
I had the means now. There need be no girls climbing over walls and pretending to be Girl Guides in Shelton Bourne – Sadie had made it quite plain that if I wanted to “entertain” girls at home, she would have no objection.
I had the opportunity, too. A number of girls, both at school and in the village shops, had hinted that they would like to get to know me better.
So all that was missing was the motive – I just didn’t feel like it.
None of the girls really attracted me, you see. Oh, I suppose several of them were pretty enough – in their way. A couple of them could even have been called beautiful – at a push. But none of them had anything like Sadie’s grace and charm. Thus, for the moment at least, I was more than willing to remain celibate.
4
Life was so full and happy that even the thought of the inevitable arrival of Les Fliques could not dampen my spirits. In fact, if truth be told, I was rather looking forward to it.
He came in late October, ambushing me at the school entrance, just as he had done in Llawesuohtihs.
He was holding a bag of roasted chestnuts in his hand.
‘Very seasonal, Chief Inspector,’ I said, cocky in my new security.
Fliques slowly munched the nut he’d just popped into his mouth, then said, ‘Not trying to be funny, are you, Bobby?’
‘Funny? About chestnuts?’
‘About me being a Chief Inspector.’
‘Aren’t you?’
‘I am not.’
If the sun had failed to set that evening, if winter had not followed autumn, I could not have been more surprised. Fliques’ promotions between our meetings were a fact of life, a small, but important, part of an inexorable cosmic law.
‘Maybe I’ll be a CI by the next time,’ Fliques said.
‘There won’t be a next time,’ I promised him.
‘What?’ he said with mock-comic surprise. ‘No more assaults with a deadly trophy? No more five-carat asphyxiations? No more heart attacks?’
‘No.’
Fliques peeled a chestnut neatly with his teeth, and spat the skin back into his bag.
‘Let’s consider the last one,’ he said. ‘A slightly different modus operandi this time, wasn’t it? You were miles away when your Auntie Jacqueline and Auntie Peggy died, but you were right there when your Auntie Catherine bought it ….’
****
Aunt Catherine is giving a demonstration lesson to Sunday school teachers from throughout the area.
‘My method is to split the lesson into two parts,’ my aunt says proudly. ‘In the first part, I tell the story in a way which makes it relevant to the children. In the second part,’ she points to the board and easel covered with the usual cloth, ‘I reveal the same story in pictures.’
A quiet, spinsterish lady with a faint moustache raises a timid hand.
‘Yes?’ my aunt says sharply.
‘I was just wondering … I mean … wouldn’t it be better to show the pictures as you tell the story?’
‘Certainly not!’ Aunt Catherine replies, her voice thick with contempt. ‘For just as we must put down the cash deposit before we can take away the television set, so we must listen to the story before we can have the pleasure of the pictures. Everyone knows that!’
‘Oh, I see,’ the spinster mumbles, looking both ashamed and humiliated.
‘The Parable of the Talents,’ my aunt announces grandly. ‘It seems that a certain man was going away for a long holiday to Tenerife, where Thompson’s had booked him into a five-star hotel which had a Jacuzzi in every bathroom. On the day of departure, he called his servants together. To one he gave two hundred pounds, to another one hundred pounds, and to the third fifty. Then he left.’
From the looks on the faces of the middle-aged ladies who make up my aunt’s audience, it is plain that they would like to do the same.
‘The first servant, on walking into town, saw there was a sale on at Rumblelows, and bought a freezer at a bargain price. The second, seeing special offers in Tesco, stocked the freezer with frozen food. The third, the unworthy one, did nothing with his money …’
On and on, my aunt drones. Many of the women in the audience have gone glassy-eyed, and most of the rest seem about to tear their hair out by the roots. Only the quiet spinster, apparently in an effort to compensate for her previous outrageous behaviour, pretends to be interested.
‘Fling this useless servant out int
o the dark, the place of wailing and grinding of National Health dentures,’ Aunt Catherine says, bringing her tale to an end. ‘Now,’ and she is looking at the spinster as she speaks, ‘now, as anyone with even a little knowledge of how to teach would understand, is the time to reveal the display.’
The spinster sinks back as far as her hard wooden chair will let her, a mortified expression on her face.
My aunt marches over to the board and easel, whips off the cloth, and steps back.
‘See!’ she demands. ‘See the good servants!’
An immediate change comes over the audience. Glazed eyes are suddenly wide. Mouths, previously set in a grim determination to stick this thing out until the end, flop helplessly open.
‘See the freezer!’ Aunt Catherine says.
‘Big Hot Screws,’ the quiet spinster reads aloud, not without a little malicious satisfaction.
‘What?’ my aunt asks.
‘Inside: The Randy Sunday School Teachers Who Cum For Jesus,’ the spinster answers.
Now, for the first time, Aunt Catherine looks at the board herself. The magazine cover from which the spinster has quoted has a photograph of a young woman carrying a Bible on it. She is wearing glasses but – regrettably – nothing else. And it is obvious from the angle at which the picture has been taken that the photographer is more interested in gynaecology than he is in religion.
Nor is that the only thing on the board. Radiating out from this central display are other examples of Aunt Catherine’s trade.
‘No!’ my aunt croaks, as she sees a transparent envelope containing fake pubic hair.
‘Urg!’ she says, when she notices the sheets of paper smeared with lipstick and adhesive love juice.
‘Aiee!’ she cries, while examining the letters written to Madam Cathy, and samples of her blackmailing replies.
With her hand pressed tightly against her chest, she turns back to the audience.
‘I can explain,’ she gasps. ‘I … I can explain … everything …’
Then her legs buckle beneath her.
Later, the doctor will say that she was probably dead by the time she hit the floor.
A Conspiracy of Aunts Page 13