by Angela Huth
‘You look like a wet week of Sundays,’ she observed. ‘Just like I feel.’ She went through the kitchen door, slamming it behind her.
Emily made for the drawing room. There, to her dismay, she found Mrs Whicker. Usually her grandmother stayed in bed late every morning. Now she sat on the chair she shared with Badger, reading a paper. It was too late for Emily to retreat. She had been seen.
‘What a dreary face,’ said Mrs Wicker. ‘When I was a child we were taught to have pleasant faces all the time. Come on in and tell me about it.’
Emily walked silently across the room. Mrs Whicker’s eyes, scarlet veined, followed her closely. She sat on the floor by the fire.
‘What’s the matter, child?’ Mrs Whicker persisted. ‘You’re going home. You should be pleased.’
Emily couldn’t help smiling at her grandmother’s perspicacity.
‘Mama and Papa are going away for a holiday,’ she said.
‘Quite right, too,’ snapped Mrs Whicker, folding her paper with great care. ‘They look as if they could do with a holiday. Parents need to get away, you’re old enough to realise that.’ She paused, then added, ‘Especially from their children.’ There was a cruelty in her tone that made Emily look up. Her grandmother, backlit by the sleety window, was a rigid, hideous figure. An ivory frame, large as a saucer, hung from a gold chain round her neck. In it was a sepia photograph of herself and Lord Warren on their wedding day, two blurred smiling figures, their arms locked as if for life. In the photograph Mrs Whicker’s young mouth tilted up with great beauty : now, it was a downward arch, bitter, ugly. As Emily made no response Mrs Whicker went on,
‘Due to circumstances your father spent much of his childhood away from me. It may have been a little hard for him at the time, but it had its excitements, it was never boring. And look at the man he’s turned out to be.’
Emily, who was afraid of her grandmother in such moods, felt a sudden boldness.
‘I’d like to have a really boring life with Mama and Papa just there all the time,’ she said.
‘Stuff and nonsense, child.’ Mrs Whicker’s scorn made her draw herself up even higher in her chair. ‘And what a dull child you’d turn out to be if that was the case.’ She stood up and walked over to the Christmas tree, whose coloured balls had lost all their sparkle in this bruised morning light. ‘When it comes to you, Emily, my dying wish will be that you may never have a boring childhood, or a boring life. Pain, yes. We all need a little of that. Incomprehensible happiness, yes. Ups and downs. Excitements and disappointments, but never boredom.’ She tapped at the lower branches of the tree with her cane. A small shower of fir needles dropped to the carpet. This seemed to please her. She turned on Emily. ‘I don’t think, as a matter of fact, my wishes will be necessary to you.’
She smiled. Her mouth became a caricature of her younger smile caught in the photograph in the ivory frame on her breast. Then, she might have been an ordinary woman. Now, Emily saw, she was a witch. A mad, evil witch, and in spite of the fire a shiver went down her spine.
Arrangements were made with shocking swiftness. A day after the pleasure of returning home Emily found herself being transported again, this time to the care of her Aunt Tabitha Wylie.
Aunt Tab had fallen on hard times. The fall had not been a very steep one, in fact: her parents had been comfortably off but not rich. They had left everything to their unmarried daughter, who was also comfortably off but, due to the high taxation of private incomes, and a certain consumption of gin, was a little less rich. But it wasn’t with her own background Aunt Tab liked to compare herself. It was her great-grandparents, illustrious landowners, from whose grandiose life she felt herself to have fallen. The fact that she had never met these ancestors, or indeed so much as visited their estates, made no difference to her standpoint. Telling the story of her tribulations so often, she had come to believe it herself, many years ago. Now, one of the pleasures left to her was to grumble about the necessity of her humble circumstances – an expensive country club-and as the grumble wasn’t a very real one, it was easy enough for her to assume a brave face. Her courage was considerably fortified by a secret supply of alcohol, though in the public bar she made a point of drinking nothing stronger than tomato juice.
The country club in which Aunt Tab had stoically lived for seventeen years was a large Regency house set among undulating lawns-a constant worry to its owners, who weekly threatened to pull it down and sell the land for building plots. Aunt Tab, who felt after all these years that the place was almost hers – unsuitably humble though it was -had volunteered to mow the lawns herself once a week. This served as a placatory measure for some time, though at any hint of a new threat Aunt Tab found herself offering yet more responsibility for the garden. ‘Let me weed the herbaceous border,’ she would cry. ‘That shall be my job … no need to worry.’ They accepted her offer, and she was the only one who worried : the gardening depressed her more than she would admit. Mud forever under her nails, the mower heavier every week, pains in her back and arms. But not for anything would she give in, having taken on these duties.
The black cedar trees Emily remembered stood at intervals on the lawns, vast keepers of the doomed grounds. (When the time came for building plots, they would have to go first. This thought, above all others, brought tears to Aunt Tab’s eyes, and re-spurred her to tackle the endless yards of neglected shrubs and flowers.) She loved the protection of the trees. The domed spaces under the lower boughs were the only unseasonable parts of the garden. There, neither snow nor sun were able to penetrate. The green gloom, the rotting foliage underfoot, the almost undiscernible wind in the great branches filled Aunt Tab with perpetual awe. Daily, she encouraged her pack of dogs from one tree to the other, hurrying across the tiresome stretches of lawn between them. Daily they disobeyed her and ran amok in the herbaceous border, tearing down plants she had so carefully tied up. But Aunt Tab’s tolerance towards her dogs was without limit : they were the gaiety in her life. They could do anything they liked, so far as she was concerned, except die. That alone was betrayal.
Emily arrived at the country club on a cheerless afternoon. Snow lay in spines along the branches of the cedar trees, but was shrinking from the edges of the lawn. Aunt Tab, hearing Emily’s taxi, wrenched herself from a confused reverie from under one of the trees, and banged her way over the lawn. She had a strident voice and a strident walk : all parts of her moved out of rhythm, the arms of her khaki anorak swinging against her thick sides.
‘Yo ho, Emily my dear. Glad to see you.’ Her voice echoed across the snow. ‘Seen the boys anywhere, have you? Hope one of them isn’t off down the road. Lads! ’ She stopped, legs apart, and whistled. From all parts of the garden her loyal pack came bounding, each in his own fashion. Whippets and bulldogs, many of them so old their leaps were reduced to stumbles. Seeing Emily through their half-blind eyes, they jumped upon her as best as they were able, sending up clouds of revolting breath. Her hands were clutched at by decaying teeth, and made slimy by mauve tongues. The trembling nails of a geriatric whippet scratched at her legs. She hadn’t remembered so many dogs. Hating them, she backed away.
‘Aunt Tab…’
‘Down, boys.’ The dogs were deaf to Aunt Tab’s command. She lunged at them, boxing some of their ragged ears, kicking softly at their swollen bellies with her gumboots. They slouched away, then, the excitement over. ‘They like to see a new face. What can you expect?’ Aunt Tab pinched Emily’s cheek and pulled her hair with the same mixture of authority and love she had bestowed upon the dogs. ‘Good to see you. You haven’t heard the news, have you? Being away for Christmas. Phoebe’s died. Christmas Eve. I never thought she would, somehow. Come and see her grave before we go in.’
They approached one of the mountainous trees. Aunt Tab lifted a lower branch, as if she was opening a front door, for Emily to duck beneath. A black-green cathedral of boughs rose above them. They had kept out the snow, but not the snow silence. The earth was soft and dry
, the light mottled green. Aunt Tab’s face, in this shade, reminded Emily of the uncooked turkey – blotchy purple. She ran a hand, matching colour, through her grizzled hair.
‘There it is. The headstone,’ she said.
Emily looked down. The stone, a simple cross, was inscribed with the words Beloved Phoebe. Jan 14th 1948 – Dec 24th 1974.
‘She must have been quite old,’ ventured Emily.
‘Game to the last,’ replied Aunt Tab. ‘Full of spirit. Fought for her life to the end. They filled her full of drugs and fixed her back legs on wheels. But she managed all right. Oh, she managed. And with dignity, too. You weren’t really aware of the wheels, with Phoebe …’
She felt in the pocket of her anorak and brought out a Mars Bar.
‘Here.’ Breaking it, she handed one half to Emily. That was the strange thing about Aunt Tab. Just as she had plunged you into the deep end of her own concerns she rescued you with something practical like chocolate. Aunt Tab held up her own half of the bar as if she were about to propose a toast.
‘No disrespect to the dead, Phoebe,’ she said quietly. Emily saw her grey lashes flutter quickly about her eyes, disturbed.
They stood looking at the grave, eating their chocolate. A funny old grown-up world, this one, thought Emily. This would make Wolf laugh if he was here. If he was here we could have quite a good time in this house and garden. Without him, there was not much point in exploring.
‘There’ll be snowdrops on Phoebe’s grave,’ said Aunt Tab, ‘when the snowdrops come.’
What a strange place, Aunt Tab’s world. You could visit it, of course, but it wouldn’t change, not for one moment, just because of your visit. Grown-ups were so often like that. So absorbed in their own lives that they just didn’t notice you at all, and you couldn’t get through to them, no matter how hard you tried. A grown-up’s preoccupation was something almost not worth fighting. But children – luckily they weren’t like that. Wolf and she, for instance. They could be very absorbed making their bird town. It interested them, they concentrated hard. But if someone came into the room, they would at once inquire whether that person had any ideas. And if they had, they’d be prepared to abandon their bird town. Immediately. They wouldn’t just carry on as if a visiting person made no difference … which it didn’t to Aunt Tab. She was pleased to see Emily. But if Emily hadn’t come she would still have gone to Phoebe’s grave, eaten half a Mars Bar, gone on to feed the other dogs. Beyond this small space of quiet under the tree, the dead Phoebe and the rest of the pack who just clung to life, nothing else seemed to exist for Aunt Tab. As she gazed at this woman who kicked gently at the grave with her foot, Emily suddenly realised this. She realised the sadness of the condition in which a visit can make no difference to you any longer. Aunt Tab’s absolute aloneness made her afraid.
‘That will be nice,’ she said, meaning about the snowdrops, though it was a long time ago since Aunt Tab had spoken. ‘And later you can put other flowers.’
‘Oh yes. I shall do that.’ Aunt Tab bent down and touched the gravestone with her hand. ‘I can’t believe she’s turning to dust down there, you know. Not that I can ever imagine her like that, dead. In my mind’s eye she will always be the young pup I bought in Farnham Common on a winter’s day, much like this.’ She paused, made her voice bright. ‘When they go, you see, they leave a hole that happy memories are just no good at filling. No good at all.’
In reaction to the force of Aunt Tab’s melancholy Emily felt a brief desire to giggle. But then an idea struck her – an idea which might even console.
‘You could always get a puppy, couldn’t you ? I mean one of the same kind as …’ Seeing the sudden horror on Aunt Tab’s face, she trailed off. Somehow, she had made a mistake.
‘A puppy, Emily? To replace Phoebe?’ Her voice rose. ‘How could any puppy …?’ Her eyes were hard with the impossibility of the thought. ‘You should never have suggested such a thing. You should know some things are irreplaceable. What would be their worth if they weren’t? But I’m sorry. You couldn’t know, could you?’
She took Emily’s arm and led her back through the branches to the brightness of the snow lawn. Having felt sorry for her, Emily’s sympathy had now quite vanished. Suggest a puppy and the woman had gone all peculiar, a quivery voice as if she was going to cry. She had been angry, too. Why had she been angry? Suddenly Emily didn’t care, or even want to know. She had had enough of Aunt Tab’s gloomy life. She wanted no more of it. It was a weight she didn’t care to understand.
Emily spent four days with Aunt Tabitha. They passed with a slowness she had never experienced before. She made charts, dividing the time down to minutes and seconds, but nothing hurried the hours. They seemed interminable.
She spent much of her time in her aunt’s private sitting room, which had long ago been given over to the considerations of the dogs. Their bowls of food cluttered the floor, never quite finished. Their upset water made damp patches on the carpet, and their moulting hairs had given the sofa and armchairs an impermanent furriness: patches of hair stuck to any human — second-class occupant of this room – who ventured to sit down.
Then there was the smell. While Aunt Tab seemed oblivious to the stench of canine life, Emily was unable to get used to it. Mornings, she would sit at the oil-cloth covered table, clear herself a space between the tins of minced rabbit, and set herself to painting. She concentrated hard, trying to take her mind off her surroundings. But it was impossible. The background hum of catarrhal snufflings aggravated her ears. The occasional high-pitched yelp, from whichever dog Aunt Tab happened to be brushing-and thereby reducing its threadbare coat nearer to a dull glow of hairless skin – sent shudders of displeasure through her body. Did her parents, she wondered, know the decayed state of Aunt Tabitha’s life? Had they really supposed they would enjoy her stay here? (As she indeed had when she was much younger, when the dogs were younger, and the pleasure of sweets a tireless one.) Probably they didn’t know. Well, they soon would. She’d tell them all right. She’d also tell them she was never coming here again. Never ever. That was quite definite. And what were they doing? She drew them, water-colour people with huge smiles, jumping about in the sea. She added herself to the picture. By rights she should have been there too. Why hadn’t they wanted her to go? After all, it was her holidays. She wouldn’t have been any trouble. She’d just have sat in the shade, reading or something. Not a bother to anyone.
Here, rain fell against the windows. It was cold in spite of the gas fire. Any moment Aunt Tab would ask her to come on the morning walk. It wasn’t fair.
‘Time for a breath of fresh air,’ Aunt Tab was indeed saying.
‘What, in this?’ Despondency, the kind so acute that you can watch the skin shrinking to goose-flesh, penetrated Emily. ‘Hadn’t we better wait till it lays off a little ?’
‘It may never lay off.’ Aunt Tabitha was squeezing the dogs, one by one, into wool-lined mackintosh coats. ‘Come along, now, Emily. On with your boots. You can be responsible for Solange.’
Solange was a particularly noxious whippet. Emily had been put in charge of her each morning, and had always had the same trouble. This morning was no exception. As the rain battened down with increasing force, so grew Solange’s determination to stand-all four quivering legs astride-in a puddle. She refused to move. Emily pulled at the chain leash, until the collar cut into the skinny neck. She shouted words of encouragement, pushed the trembling buttocks with a frustrated hand – all to no avail. Solange stood her ground, her muzzle darkening as it grew wetter. Emily, cold, despairing, watched Aunt Tab’s boxy figure become smaller in the distance, the rest of the pack snuckering about her, apparently enjoying themselves. To avoid being left in her miserable position until Aunt Tab’s return (an hour, at least) there was only one thing left to do. Emily bent down and picked up the dog. Its ribs rattled under her hands; its skinny legs scrabbled against her and it raised its top lip in a delicate snarl. Such loathing Emily had never felt f
or any living creature. Revulsion almost blinded her. She waded through the puddles, rain meeting with tears on her cheeks, and started running to catch up with Aunt Tab. Never again would she touch Solange, or any of them, no matter how angry it made Aunt Tab. She’d tell Mama and Papa. She would. They’d understand and never make her come here again. Then she remembered : no, they wouldn’t understand. How could they? At home, it would be impossible to describe how this morning had been. It would simply sound like a funny story.
‘The funny thing about Solange,’ Aunt Tab was saying, when Emily at last reached her, ‘is that she shouldn’t have been a dog at all, but an otter. That’s what I often think.’
It rained for four days, decaying the snow, drenching Emily and Aunt Tab and the dogs both morning and afternoon. Between walks much time was spent fitting wet clothes – dogs’ and humans’ – on to the one lukewarm radiator. They were never quite dry in time for the next walk.
Apart from going out, the only time they left Aunt Tab’s private apartment was for meals. In spite of relief from the dogs, Emily dreaded these intervals. For in the public dining room Aunt Tab gave vent to her most outrageous feelings about her fellow country club guests. In a voice well suited to bellowing across open spaces, she would indulge in observations that would cause Emily to blush throughout the meal. (The heat of her face made an uncomfortable contrast to the chill that had settled over the rest of her body.)
‘Of course, these people aren’t anybody,’ Aunt Tab would say, netting in her glance the dozen or so middle-aged people who ate in the compromise silence brought upon them by years of compromise marriage. ‘Anybody who’s anybody knows that dogs are allowed into the grandest dining rooms in England. They’re absurd, the sort of rules they make in these places.’ A few diners would look up, scarcely interested. They’d heard it all before, were apparently impervious to insults. But their indifference only served further to enrage Aunt Tab – particularly at dinner, when the three glasses of iced water upstairs ‘to cool me off’ had failed to do so. Her voice would increase in volume, easily rising above Brahms’ Ten Greatest Hits which the muzak played over and over again. ‘If one of the lads should have a heart attack during dinner, and I arrived too late, we know who we should blame.’ She bent towards Emily. ‘We know who we should blame, don’t we?’ As Emily made no reply she added, ‘In my grandfather’s house one of the labradors died in Queen Elizabeth I’s bed. No one minded, naturally. But then the upper classes understand about style, always have. Whereas these people …’ She flicked a contemptuous hand over her plate, knocking a row of prune stones on to the tablecloth.