Aunt Maria

by Diana Wynne Jones

  “Hush, child,” said Mr. Phelps. He kept trying to stop me talking about things like that. He said, “Hush!” every time I mentioned the mound or any of the mad things Antony Green had done, but Antony Green didn’t mind, and Mum didn’t try to stop me.

  “I could cut the beard off,” he said, looking in the mirror.

  “I wish you would,” I said. ”It looks awful.”

  “And my hair?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said Mum and I.

  “Then could you find some scissors, Nat?” Antony Green asked. Mr. Phelps looked at the ceiling and took a pair of scissors out of his dressing-gown pocket. He held them toward Mum, but Mum waved to him to give them to Antony Green. Mr. Phelps raised his eyebrows, but he put the scissors into Antony Green’s pale, withered hand. Antony Green looked at the scissors uncertainly for a moment, then he said, “I’d be grateful for a bit of help, really.”

  So Mum cut his hair and his beard. He looked quite a bit better like that. I think his hair was sort of bleached by the earth, because it was much darker near the roots. Or maybe he turned it darker. When it was done, he looked at himself again and said he ought to shave the beard right off. So we all pothered around for Mr. Phelps’s shaving things. In the midst of the pother, I began to suspect we had simply swapped looking after Aunt Maria for looking after Antony Green.

  “Don’t be unfair, Mig!” Mum said. “It’s not a bit the same. You can’t expect someone who’s been buried alive to get over it in half a day!”

  “I don’t suppose he ever will,” I said. “And how are we ever going to get Chris back now?”

  We were unwisely whispering this in the bathroom doorway. While I was saying that, we both realized that Antony Green must have heard. He was staring at us with the razor poised and half his face covered with white cream. We stared back guiltily.

  “The two black cats!” Antony Green said. “I knew I’d seen you somewhere else before that dream! You were trying to warn me, weren’t you?”

  I said, “Yes. And we sent you into the mound by tripping you up.” Mr. Phelps was bustling jerkily about, picking up every bit of Antony Green’s hair in a ritualistic kind of way, and he of course began shushing me. But I took no notice and said, “Would you have stayed out and realized about Naomi, if we hadn’t done that?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” Antony Green said. “There’s no need to feel guilty about it.” He turned back to the mirror and began shaving himself again. He said the rest in jerks, while he was dipping the razor in water or twisting his face sideways to see if he had got all the beard off the sides. “I was besottedly set on it, I’m afraid. It wasn’t only Naomi’s doing. I wanted to force her to be trustworthy—I didn’t realize that if people really can trust one another, it doesn’t need proving. I only saw that”—he paused, scraping the place under his funny bent nose, to say this—“some rather long months later.”

  “But you did love Naomi,” I said. “And I’m afraid she’s—”

  “Hush!” said Mr. Phelps.

  “Dead,” said Antony Green quite calmly, turning his face up to do under his chin. “I know she must be, or I wouldn’t be out. I saw what she was like quite early on … when an hour had passed and I was still underground. But her mother’s still alive, isn’t she?”

  “Yes!” Mr. Phelps said, in an angry explosion.

  “But something else happened,” said Antony Green. He seemed to turn saner and saner as he talked. Maybe it was the sight of his own face coming out of the lather. It wasn’t a usual face, and it was awfully thin, but wasn’t the mad castaway’s face, or the court jester’s face of the ghost, either. It was sort of halfway between those and the face of the young man who had bent down and held out his hand to me as a kitten. “Something gave me an access of strength a short while back,” he said. “I was almost done for by then. But I suddenly began to be able to project and dream and time travel again.”

  Mr. Phelps gave me a meaning glare. “Oh,” I said. “Me. I opened the green box and a lot of the stuff got out.”

  Antony Green caught my eye in the mirror. “Thank you,” he said. “Your brother’s a wolf, isn’t he?”

  See what I mean about him getting saner? “How do you know?” I said.

  “I saw you with him in that room,” he said. “I’d gone back to the present by then. First of all, I homed in on the green box and tried to find it. It was in that room for years, and I went doggedly through the years, trying to find someone there with it who might help me. I’d worked back to about four months ago, before there was anyone in the room at all, and then unfortunately there was Gregory Laker—”

  “Dad,” I said. “What did he do?”

  “Took the box away,” Antony Green said. “I managed to make him understand—I thought. But perhaps he didn’t. He got very excited.”

  If Antony Green could accept hard facts, I thought I could. “He wanted it himself,” I said. “He envied you. He told me.” Mum sat on the edge of the bath and looked unhappy. I said, mostly to make her feel better, “Aunt Maria got at him after that, and I think he forgot he’d seen you.”

  “So I had to try again,” Antony Green said. He finished shaving and turned round to talk after that. “Something had happened, because I still thought the green box was in that room. I found the next person by daylight—an elderly woman I didn’t know—who was making up the bed.”

  “Lavinia?” Mum asked me.

  “I scared her silly,” Antony Green said. “She began laughing hysterically and ran out of the room shouting, ‘Mrs. Laker! You did some poor fellow in, didn’t you? I’m not staying with you one moment longer!’ And I never saw her again.”

  “She’s a cat now,” I said.

  “So then I found your brother,” said Antony Green. “I’d just begun to make him understand, and I was almost at my last gasp, when I realized he was a wolf, and you were there.” The way he said this made me see that the nights must have run together for Antony Green. I suppose they would if you were lying underground. He frowned a bit and said, “I must put that right at once.”

  “Oh, bless your heart!” Mum said.

  Fourteen

  They went to find Chris, but I stayed behind. I was sitting on the edge of the Phelpses’ bath nine-tenths asleep by then. Mum didn’t seem to notice that two mornings in succession add up to a whole day. There is that advantage to not understanding time travel. She was fresh as a daisy. And I hadn’t done credit to how worried she was about Chris. She said to Antony Green, “I could have screamed all the time you were careering round the town! I kept thinking of poor Chris.”

  He gave her his long, mischievous, getting-away-with-it grin. “I am sorry.”

  “No, you’re not,” said Mum. “You were enjoying yourself. Not that I blame you.”

  Antony Green was fresh, too, in a calm, easy way. I supposed as I nodded on the edge of the bath that he had had twenty years to rest in, but now I think it was more than that. He had something within him, now that he was sane. He turned to Mr. Phelps and held out a hand. “I’ll take the green box, Nat.”

  Mr. Phelps took the wonderful flashing, glowing box out of his pocket and plonked it into Antony Green’s hand, very hastily, as if it hurt him to touch it. Then he bustled to the bathroom cupboard and came back with the big green highwayman’s-coat kind of robe. It smelled of mothballs. “I rescued this from the woods,” he said.

  Antony Green looked up from running his fingers gently over the patterns on the box, and his long grin was rather bemused. It often is, actually. “Thanks,” he said. “But I don’t think I’m quite ready to reassume that yet. Can you keep it here and make people think I’m here with it?”

  He opened and shut the box a tiny bit as he said it. Mr. Phelps gave a pained gasp at the waste and said, “Certainly. But—”

  “I’m going to disappoint you, Nat, I know,” Antony Green said. “I always did, rather, didn’t I? I had time to think underground. And I’m not sure I care for our way of doing t
hings here. Men’s ways with the power shut in the box. Women’s ways with the virtue hoarded in the Queen—”

  “Virtue!” Mum said. She almost exploded at the idea. “How can you sit there—! After all you’ve been through, how can you sit there and call Auntie virtuous?”

  “It means something different, Mum,” I said.

  Antony Green turned to Mum, sort of kindly. “Yes, it does,” he said. “It’s an old use of the word, meaning a certain kind of power. It’s been our word for it in Cranbury for centuries. It goes back to the time when somebody here decided that men and women were different sorts of people and the rules for the ways they used the power should be different. That was early in the Middle Ages, I think. They divided into men’s ways and women’s ways then, and they’ve been making up more and more rules ever since to make the difference seem even bigger. Women allowed men the strong, out-of-doors things—provided the men put the virtue of their thoughts and ambitions into the box so that it couldn’t get loose and run wild—while the men gave over all the secret, indoors things to the women—on condition the main power was kept safe by just a few strong women who would work by the rules. Those are the ones we call the Queens.”

  “You make it all sound like an anthill,” Mum said.

  “It is,” he said, “particularly when it goes as wrong as it seems to have done these last twenty years. And the whole arrangement is nonsense, anyway. I want everyone to be free to use the power as they need to. The stuff in this box was once the birthright of every living soul in the world, you know.”

  Mr. Phelps stood to attention in a loyal way and said, “It’s my place to follow you, Antony. I understand.”

  “You don’t, Nat,” Antony Green said.

  It was about this point that I went to sleep and fell into the bath. Mum realized how tired I was and I got bundled along to Miss Phelps’s bed. “We’ll be back soon with Chris,” Mum said. “You have a rest, Miggie. You’ve done valiantly.”

  I went to sleep for a bit, I don’t know for how long. It was still broad daylight when I woke up, and I think it was early afternoon. The house was quiet except for some gobbling snores from somewhere. I woke up realizing that we weren’t going back to Aunt Maria’s and that all my things were in her house. What will Mum do without her pea green knitting? I thought. And there’s my writing! I knew it would be a real disaster if Aunt Maria found my locked book and read all I had written about her. I knew I just had to get it back.

  I was so worried that I got up and ran downstairs. I went into the living room to tell Miss Phelps about my writing. But she was curled up on the sofa like a rather big, gnomish baby, fast asleep. It was quite reasonable that she should be asleep. She’d had a busy morning. It never occurred to me to wonder. I tiptoed out and let myself softly out through the front door.

  I told myself I would just sneak in through the back door. Aunt Maria was deaf, after all. If I was quiet, I could go in and out without her hearing a thing.

  Well, I sneaked in. There wasn’t a sound as I opened the kitchen door. I crept through the empty dining room across empty squares of sun lying on the dismal carpet. It never occurred to me that this was odd. At that time of day, the room ought to have been full of Mrs. Urs, clustered round the silver teapot. But I didn’t think of that. I tiptoed through the hall and raced quietly upstairs, feeling very pleased with myself. My locked book, instead of being hidden under the bedroom carpet, was lying out on the bedroom table. Somehow that didn’t worry me at all. I got Mum’s pea green knitting out and put it carefully on the bed to remind me to take it, too. Then I sat down and unlocked my book. There is such a lot I have to put down now! I thought.

  I sat there, and I wrote and wrote. It was very odd. I remembered exactly what had happened and what it meant to me at the time, and I knew it was real and urgent, but I never seemed to notice it was stupid to sit and write about it in Aunt Maria’s house. I put down all about the wolf hunt, and I remember I got very impatient at how long that took, because I had all about Antony Green to put down, too, but it never occurred to me to connect it with the way I was behaving now.

  Then when the light was getting a bit dim, I looked up with a jump to see a tall black figure standing in the doorway. It was Elaine. “Come downstairs,” she said. “Your aunt wants to speak to you.”

  My heart kind of squeezed. I could hardly breathe for sheer terror. When I stood up, my knees would hardly hold me.

  Elaine walked to the table and picked up my open book. “I’ll have that,” she said. I remember my pen softly thudding on the carpet as she said, “If you are going to pour your thoughts out on paper, you ought to hide your scribbles in a better place. I found this in two seconds flat. You are a rude little beast, aren’t you? I hope she makes you pay for some of the things you said.” Then she marched me out of the room and down the stairs, holding me in her policeman’s grip. As we were going down, she asked, “Where’s your mother?”

  Terror was roaring in my ears, but I had just sense to say, “No idea. She went off without me.”

  “I’ll go and round her up later,” said Elaine. She shoved me into the living room and shut the door after me.

  “Come and sit down, dear,” Aunt Maria said. She was sitting on her roped-up state sofa with a low pink lamp cozily lighting up her face. Her sticks were lying propped beside her, as if she didn’t intend to use them. But they were there in case of emergencies. She pointed to the little armchair drawn up facing the sofa. “Dear little Naomi,” she said. “I love talking to you, dear.” She had her most kindly teddy-bearish look. It really was hard to see her without thinking of her as cuddly and lovable.

  Elaine was clanking about in the hall somewhere as I sat down. There was no chance of getting away. I stared at Aunt Maria’s sweet, rosy face, and I had a sudden understanding of how Zoe Green had gone mad. Here were all these peculiar and awful things going on, and you knew all about them and wanted to scream and yell and cry, and yet here was Aunt Maria, so gentle and cuddly and civilized that you couldn’t quite believe the awful things were happening. You felt guilty just thinking about them. You felt guiltier believing the awful things were true. As Aunt Maria began talking, I really began thinking something must be wrong with me for imagining she was wicked in the least.

  She talked and talked. Mad and improbable though it seems, most of what she said was exactly the same as the usual things: what Adele Taylor had said to Hester Bailey—who paints such gifted pictures, dear—and what both of them had said to Benita Wallins. And on and on, about all the other Mrs. Urs. I remember having a little fleeting underneath thought that the main spell Aunt Maria cast was boredom. I kept having little fleeting thoughts. They were like little jabs of sanity in a vast, numb desert of boredom, as Aunt Maria’s voice went on and on. You have to listen to her. She has this way of saying, “Listen, dear. This is really interesting!” And you do, and it’s always the most boring thing yet.

  Elaine began vacuuming the hall at some point, making another droning in my ears. One of my little jabbing thoughts was, She’s a fool to leave Larry alone now Antony Green is out. But it didn’t make any difference to the way I sat having to listen. My ears and my mind got blurred, so that I almost didn’t catch the important things as Aunt Maria said them. They were sort of slipped in among the droning.

  “Dear, you have really hurt me, but we shan’t talk of that. I love my little new Naomi, and I know she loves me….” Then she went on in a sighing way about how beautiful and gentle the old Naomi was, and what a brilliant mind she had. “You have a brilliant mind, too, dear,” she said. And I had a jabbing thought that it was no wonder Naomi tried to get the better of Aunt Maria. She must have been sick of her.

  Then after desert miles of more talk, I realized Aunt Maria was saying, “It hurt me to find you didn’t trust me, dear. Hurt me very much indeed that you went and looked for your father by yourself. I was saving him as a wonderful surprise for you, for when you understood. I’m sure you understand now t
hat he had to pass through death so that he could use the funny little box properly. I hope you and he and I will be working closely together in future….”

  So that’s it! I thought. But Antony Green has been through death, too.

  But I still didn’t understand that Aunt Maria meant me to be her successor, not until ages more droning on about Mrs. Urs, when Elaine’s vacuum cleaner went through into the dining room. Aunt Maria lowered her voice and leaned forward. “So Ann Haversham went to Selma Tidmarsh and they agreed to look after Elaine for me. Poor Elaine is very jealous, you know. She wanted to step into my Naomi’s place. But I had already chosen you, dear, years ago, as soon as your father first brought you here to see me. It’s a pity your father and mother don’t get on. I brought you all here to reunite you. And of course I sent Lavinia away so that you could be one of the thirteen just as soon as you were ready.”

  I sort of fizzed with horror as soon as she said that. Be one of the Mrs. Urs! Be like Elaine! I felt sick. I truly didn’t hear the next bit of droning. When I next attended, Aunt Maria was chuckling at me in a roguish, matey way.

  “So this is really your first lesson, dear. Do you understand how it’s done? The main spell is just talk, and that’s quite easy, but of course you are working away underneath the talk, putting all sorts of things into people’s minds and tying their thoughts into the right shape. This is something you’ll learn in time. It takes time. I wish you could have been there when I had my long talk with poor Zoe Green. That was me at my best.”

  I stared at her. I couldn’t believe it.

  “Ah, yes, dear. You do understand,” Aunt Maria said. “The power is vested in you. It tore loose from poor Naomi when the men made that mistake over her. I felt you take it on yourself early this morning. You do understand, dear.”

  Oh, no! I thought. In order to let Antony Green out, I had to be one of them! Why didn’t I realize?

  “I think you’re tired now, dear,” Aunt Maria said. And I was. I went to sleep on the spot. I don’t know what happened after that, except that I woke up next morning in the orphanage.