Aunt Maria

by Diana Wynne Jones

  “What’s that?” yells Aunt Maria.

  By this time I’d got the giggles, and Mum was looking tragic and misused. I said hurriedly that the cat was probably exactly like Lavinia. Mum relaxed. Chris went to bed and Aunt Maria went back to sleep. “Why are you so worked up about what the cat looks like?” I said.

  Mum was in bed and so was the cat by then. We shall have to buy some flea powder. “Because I think it may be Lavinia’s cat,” Mum said. “I think she may have left it behind expecting Aunt Maria would feed it … or she may have owned it secretly … or, oh, all sorts of things.”

  “How do you work that out?” I said.

  “Because animals do grow to look like their owners,” Mum said seriously. “Everyone knows that.”

  I would have hooted with laughter, only I knew it would wake Aunt Maria again. So I just got on with writing this. And while I did, it dawned on me that I am just as crazy as Mum. I am being quite as unreasonable over that blue Ford which is so like our old car.

  Since then, the cat gets called Lavinia. The name seems to suit her. She answers to it quite well, and she seems to have got more interesting with a name, somehow.

  But something really extraordinary has just happened. Can a cat be that intelligent? It’s hard to believe. Anyway, I wrote quite a lot of this the next morning. It is Sunday. Aunt Maria has gone to church in her dead fox and her high hat and her wheelchair, in one procession of Elaine, Mum, and voiceless Larry as before. She wanted us, too, but Mum said we hadn’t got proper clothes. Talking of clothes, Elaine has a black coat on today which is quite a clever imitation of the usual mac, and a black beret. All she needs is jackboots and a rifle, though Chris says a stocking mask over her face would improve it. Chris has gone to the beach.

  I had to stop writing and let Lavinia out. She was urgent. And I am scared of them coming back and finding a cat in the house. But Lavinia wouldn’t go out unless I came into the garden, too. I kept opening the door, and she kept backing away from it, and looking at me and then mewing to go out when I shut the door—cats can be maddening. So I stomped out, holding my pen and rather cross. And Lavinia ran away from me. It must have been because I was cross.

  “Oh, God!” I said. “She thinks I’m like Elaine.” I felt a beast. So I called and called, and she came out from the gooseberry bushes, just a little way. When I went to get her, she ran away again, into the garden shed. I went in there and looked. She was crouched up on a sloping high shelf full of flowerpots and cobwebs. “Do come down,” I said. “I’m not like Elaine—really. I’m sorry.” But she wouldn’t come. She just crouched away backward when I tried to reach her. I had to get an old bucket and stand on it upside down before I was tall enough to grab her. “I don’t know why I’m doing this,” I told her as I grabbed. “Unless it will prove I like you or something.”

  She tried to get away when I thought I had her, and I unbalanced and tried to save myself on the shelf. And the whole shelf came down in a rain of flowerpots, dust, Lavinia, and garden catalogs covered with cobwebs. I stood in the ruins staring at a fat, faded exercise book that had been in the pile of catalogs. It was two shades paler and covered in those brown dots that grow on paper in garden sheds, but I knew what it was even before I’d got enough dust out of my eyes to read my own writing on the front.

  “The Story of the Twin Princesses,” by Naomi Margaret Laker. That was my story that had still been hidden in our car when Dad drove off to France in it with Verena Bland. It had still been in the car when Dad stormed off after seeing us at Christmas, because I kept forgetting to ask for it what with all the quarreling there had been.

  “So Dad did get here!” I said.

  I looked for Lavinia then. She was sitting outside the door of the shed, giving herself a good, proper wash. It’s the first time I’ve seen her wash. She looked very pleased with herself. She wouldn’t come indoors when I went in with the exercise book. She seemed to know they’d be back from church soon.

  I’ve looked at the book a hundred times since then. I’ve thought round and round. The book is very dusty and rather damp, but I know it has never been wet—not wet the way a book would have been which had been in a car that had fallen into the sea. The story I dropped in my bath dried all wavy, with brown marks, and the printed lines were washed out on some pages, as well as a lot of the writing. This book is flat and none of the ink has run. It doesn’t even smell of sea, but it does, behind the dust, smell just faintly of the inside of our car. So what is it doing hidden in Aunt Maria’s garden shed? Someone hid it, someone tall enough to reach that shelf, and I’d never have found it but for Lavinia.

  That someone has to be Dad. I think he did get to Aunt Maria’s house after all, and he was coming away when he went off the cliff. But why didn’t Aunt Maria say he came here? I know Mum would say the shock was too much for Aunt Maria and she forgot, or something. Or could Dad have sneaked into the house? I don’t know. But my first thought was that Dad had left a message in the exercise book. I shook it in case there was a loose paper, but there wasn’t. Then I went carefully through every page. Because it was such a nice fat book, I’d left every other page blank when I wrote that story, so that I could write notes and corrections on the empty page. It was a new, experimental method of writing that didn’t seem to suit my genius. I got stuck in that story worse than I’ve ever been before. But it had left a lot of places where Dad could have written something if he’d wanted. And he hadn’t. I even held each page up at eye level and looked across it, in case there were dents, like in detective stories, where something had been written in invisible ink. The trouble is, I had made dents writing deeply, thoughtfully, and stuckly, but I quite honestly can’t find any dents that aren’t obviously mine. So I am as puzzled as ever. I am hiding the book to show Chris.

  I did show Chris but not till the middle of the night. Elaine was here all evening, with Larry Mr. Elaine. Larry actually spoke once or twice. He handed Aunt Maria official-looking letters and said, “This is from the tax office. This is from the broker,” in a low, respectful voice. I think he is a lawyer. Elaine took her black coat off and hung it on a chair, but it didn’t make much difference. She had a black dress underneath. She talked to Chris mostly, in a loud jolly voice, saying things like, “And what were you up to all day, my lad? I had news of you up on the Head and then over by the orphanage and off in Loup Woods, until I thought you must be in several places at once!”

  This made Chris wriggle, rather, and grin, but he didn’t seem annoyed. Mum started another sweater sleeve. I think she is knitting clothes for an octopus. I tried to draw a picture of Aunt Maria, but I couldn’t show anyone because it went wrong and made her look like an insect. Mum saw it when we were getting ready for bed and Lavinia was sitting purring on my pillow again. We must get some flea powder.

  “Oh, Mig!” Mum said reproachfully, holding my drawing under the candlelight. I felt bad. Aunt Maria had been like a teddy bear again when we put her to bed. “I know what you mean, though,” Mum said. She smiled her bright and indulging smile. “She’s a large, golden, furry insect. A queen bee. That’s how all the Mrs. Urs think of her, I’m sure. It amuses me the way they all run around her and make sure she’s happy, just as if they were workers and she were their queen. It’s funny.”

  “If it makes you laugh,” I said, and I pushed Lavinia out of the way and pretended to go to sleep. I waited until Aunt Maria was snoring and Mum was almost snoring. Then I got up in the dark. I heard Lavinia thump down off the bed and come after me, but that didn’t help. I was terrified. My hands were curled up and cold, but wet on the palms, and my heart was banging in my throat till it ached. Suppose I meet the ghost! I kept thinking. It was worse on the landing, where there was Aunt Maria’s night-light shining round her bedroom door. There was just enough light to show me how pitch-dark it was. I nearly ran away from the big clock where I’d hidden the book. It looked like a person. Clunk! it went as I took the book out from behind it. I was so scared, I dived for t
he stairs.

  “Is that you, Naomi?” called Aunt Maria. “What are you doing, dear?”

  As I was halfway downstairs, I couldn’t say I was going to the john. I said, “I’m hungry, Auntie. I’m going to look for a cookie.”

  “Be careful you don’t fall, dear,” called Aunt Maria.

  I stood on the stairs waiting for her to start snoring again for about a year. Only Lavinia fluffily rubbing round my legs kept me sane—and even so I kept thinking, What if a light comes on and I find she’s only a bundle of bones and cobwebs! But six months after I thought that, there came the well-known rasping snore from Aunt Maria. Zzz zzz, the queen bee buzzing, I thought, as I fled downstairs.

  Chris’s door was half open. There was a scrape and a flare inside the room as Chris lit his candle. “Come in and shut the door,” he whispered. “What’s up?” And when I’d shut the door, he said, “You sat there all evening looking like a rabbit in someone’s headlights. I knew you’d come down. You should learn to hide your feelings a bit.”

  Ghost or not, the room Chris has is a nice room. It’s cozy. The gold print on all the books glints by candlelight and the room smells of books. Chris has added improvements: a hanging flower basket over his bed that holds matches, cookies, and a book; an oil lamp; a fishing line hooked to the ceiling that is supposed to draw the curtains; and a thermometer propped on the bookshelf by the window.

  “That’s for the ghost,” Chris explained. “They’re supposed to make a cold spot where they appear, but I don’t think this one does. Why did you bring that cat?”

  “I didn’t. She just came,” I said. I showed him the book. “Know what this is?”

  “‘The Collected Works of N. M. Laker,’” Chris said. “You wrote it last year and got sick in the car—oh!” And he was impressed enough to light his oil lamp. “So Dad did get as far as this house,” he said. “Give it here. Is there a message in it?”

  But Chris couldn’t find any message in the book, either. I told him all about how I had found it trying to get Lavinia down and how it had to be a tall person like Dad who put it on the shelf.

  “Elaine could have reached,” said Chris.

  “Yes, but why?” I said. “Why didn’t Aunt Maria say Dad came here, if he did?”

  “Guilt, I should think,” said Chris.

  “Guilt? Oh, you can’t mean that!” I said. “Should we go to the police?”

  Chris was looking through and through the book with my story on every other page. He said in a casual sort of way, “I haven’t seen a single bobby in Cranbury, but I’m willing to bet he’ll be a zombie like Larry when we do see him. Try if you like, Mig. But I’d rather you waited. This book means something, if I could just work it out. For one thing, how did the cat know it was there?”

  “She couldn’t have,” I said. “She must have been living in the shed and I frightened her and she went back there.”

  Chris turned and looked at Lavinia. She looked back—she was sitting neat and upright in the exact middle of Chris’s pillow, staring out of flat yellow eyes from her stupid flat gray face. Her tail was wrapped neatly in front of her stumpy front paws, which turn outward rather. “Like an old woman’s feet,” I said. “She’s an old maid cat.”

  “I wonder!” said Chris. He made an incredulous laugh. “I wonder, Mig! Mum could be right! Hadn’t Lavinia got a wide flat sort of face and gray hair? I remember her turned-out feet. Her toes were humpy.”

  I was beginning to say that a joke was a joke, but no one can really turn a person into a cat, when I had a most peculiar feeling. Let’s see if I can describe it. First, it was as if at the back of my mind somewhere I was out-of-doors. There was that open feeling you get. It was as chilly, wherever it was at the back of my mind, as those leaves I knelt on in the wood. With it I could sort of sense grass rustling, wind blowing, and the smell of earth, mixed with that almost gluey smell some new buds have. I had just noticed that, when the wind bringing the feeling seemed to be blowing on my back. I came up in goose pimples and smelled earth stronger than ever. The lamp and the candle both sort of faded, like when the moon goes behind a cloud. The cat jumped to all four feet and stood in an arch, glaring, twice the size with wildly standing hair.

  “Is it the ghost?” I said.

  “Yes—he’s coming,” said Chris. “Don’t stay in here! Out, out, out!”

  I don’t remember getting up off Chris’s bed. I was at the door and I dragged it open, and Lavinia nearly tripped me up in her hurry to get through it first. She fled upstairs into the dark, and I fled after her, and I wasn’t scared of the dark a bit. I remember thinking how brave Chris was as I got myself into bed beside warm, warm Mum, and then I nearly jumped out again with a yell until I realized that Lavinia had got down into the bed, too. She stayed there, crouching by my feet, and no amount of shoving would make her budge. She was still there this morning.

  “We must get some flea powder,” Mum said. Chris came down to breakfast scratching, too. But he didn’t look as tired as I did.

  “Mig and I will go and get some flea powder,” Chris said. He had thought of something he needed to tell me, I could see by his face. Mum saw, too, and told me to go.

  “What’s that, dear? I don’t need knee powder,” said Aunt Maria. “My knee only comes on in the winter.”

  “Sea chowder,” said Chris.

  Mum said very loudly and clearly, “Mig and Chris are going to buy some seafood for lunch, Auntie.”

  “Chris can go,” said Aunt Maria. “I want my little Naomi by my side.”

  “Auntie,” said Mum, “isn’t it enough to have me tied to the house waiting on you hand and foot, without making a prisoner of Mig, too?” Now, the way she looked at Aunt Maria made us sure the worm had turned at last.

  “I stand rebuked,” said Aunt Maria, with a merry little laugh. “What a strict little nurse you are, Betty! Let them go and buy your face powder, dear. But you won’t get whelks on a Monday.”

  Arguing with Aunt Maria is like that. You end up wondering what you were talking about. Chris and I laughed about it all the way to the seafront. We went to the sea because Chris said it was the most private place. It wasn’t. Hester Bailey passed us, all wrapped up, with a little dog on a lead; then Benita Wallins stumping along with a plastic bag of shopping; then Phyllis and Selma Ur, and it was, “Goooood morning! Auntie well?” from each.

  “There seems to be an alert out,” Chris said. “I wonder if Aunt Maria knows what you found. Oh, Lord! Here comes Mr. Phelps now. Let’s go down on the sand and wait for some peace.”

  Mad Mr. Phelps strode past us swinging his walking stick. “Morning, Christian,” he said, taking no notice of me.

  “Morning,” Chris said, rather grudgingly over his shoulder, as he scrambled down on to the beach. The tide was out a long way. Chris ran toward the sea, floundering and crunching in the banks of pebbles, and then sprinting on the flat brown sand beyond, setting spurts of water flying. When I caught him up, he was sitting on a rock watching the waves roll seaweed about, panting. He was awfully pleased with himself. “Good,” he said. “Phelps knows I found something at last.”

  “How does he?” I said. “Why should he? Besides, I found my story, not you.”

  “Throw stones,” said Chris. “Look casual. We mustn’t look as if we’re talking about anything important.”

  I threw stones. It was too cold in the wind not to keep moving about. But I was annoyed at Chris for being so pleased and mysterious. “Tell me,” I said, “or I may throw stones at you.”

  “He says, ‘Good morning,’” Chris said. “I say, ‘Morning,’ if I’ve got something. If I say, ‘Good morning,’ it means I’ve got it. We arranged it the day Miss Phelps fell down.”

  “What’s it?” I said. “What’s it all about?”

  “The thing the ghost is looking for, of course,” said Chris. “He needs it. It contains most of Antony Green’s power, and Mr. Phelps is the last one left now. He’s got a right to it. He was Antony Gree
n’s second in command before they did for Antony Green.”

  “Who did for Antony Green?” I said.

  “The same people who did for Dad. Obviously,” Chris said. He began to ramble along the sand, throwing stones into the sea. The wind was nothing like as strong as it had been that first day, but it was still hard to hear him. I thought he said, “Mrs. Urs,” as he went.

  I ran after him. “Mr. Phelps is awfully mad,” I said.

  “I knew you wouldn’t understand,” Chris said. “Being female puts you automatically on the other side.”

  That really annoyed me. “No, it doesn’t. I’m neutral like Miss Phelps,” I said. “And I want to know. Or are you being mysterious about nothing?”

  We went rambling and wrangling along beside the waves until our feet were crusty with wet sand. Chris kept squirting out bits of explanation, the way he had talked about the ghost, in jerks. I think he was scared and ashamed of thinking some of the things he was thinking, too. He rather thought Mr. Phelps was mad. “He’s a fitness freak,” he said. “He does judo as well as that sword stuff. When he comes along the front, he’s coming back from swimming. In all weathers. He says it’s the way he stays above the common herd.” Worse than Dad.

  “Yes, but,” I said, “what has my story in the garden shed to do with Mr. Phelps and Antony Green and the ghost?”

  “It proves Dad did see Aunt Maria, probably. Right?” said Chris. “Now Dad is a native of Cranbury, remember. He’d know the whole story of Antony Green, and he’d know what the ghost was looking for. Suppose he came and stayed with Aunt Maria. Lavinia would be in the room you and Mum have, so Dad would have the room I’m in, wouldn’t he?”

  “So it is Dad’s ghost!” I cried out.

  “No, it isn’t, you fool!” said Chris. And he went running away on top of his own reflection shining down in the wet sand. I couldn’t make him stop for ages. But at last he stood still and said unfairly, “Have you calmed down? Right. Then suppose Dad saw the ghost and looked for what it was looking for and found it. What would he do then? It’s valuable, remember, and he wouldn’t want Aunt Maria to know he’d found it.”