Aunt Maria

by Diana Wynne Jones

  “Take it off, darn you!” George shouted. “What do I do with a bloody tiara for a boat? Pardon my language,” he added to Mum.

  Antony Green scooped his hands along the edges of the boat and rattled the glittering stones in two handfuls down into the green moldy bottom of the boat. “That better?”

  George bent his hatted head and stared, grudgingly. “Think you could make it pearls, instead?” he said. “More natural and easier to sell, those are.”

  So Antony Green ran the handfuls of jewels through his hands again, and they rattled down like peas, only pinkish and whitish and nacreous. (Now there’s a good word! Only a genius would have used nacreous.) We left George sorting them out into sizes after we landed and walked back along the seafront to Aunt Maria’s house. Antony Green, a bit to my surprise, came with us, and we met the Phelpses on the way. Miss Phelps was very cheery, but Mr. Phelps was long-suffering. “Pity you can’t stay,” he said stiffly.

  We all came up the street together. And it was lucky that Aunt Maria’s house didn’t have a garage at one side the way the Phelpses did across the road. Aunt Maria’s house was not there anymore. There was no gap. Elaine’s house was up against the house on the other side of Aunt Maria’s. Mum’s rattletrap little car was parked in the street between the two.

  “Oh, dear!” said Mum, thinking of all our clothes that seemed to have gone for good.

  “I rescued one or two important things,” said Miss Phelps.

  She had, sort of. Mum’s pea green knitting was on the bonnet of the car with Chris’s guitar and his sacred workbooks. My precious locked book slithered off the bonnet and fell in the road as a desperate gray cat jumped off the knitting and ran toward us, mewing for help and comfort.

  “Lavinia!” cried Mum. “I’d clean forgotten about her.”

  Lavinia instantly lay soppily on her back on the pavement, waving paws in the air. Antony Green said, in a tired way, “I’d better see to her, too.” He squatted down and put his hand on Lavinia’s squirming chest. She most ungratefully dug all her front claws into him and treadled his hand with her back ones. She squalled and tried to bite him. Antony Green’s hand was in a worse state than Mr. Phelps’s cheek by the time he had forced the gray cat to spread into woman shape. He had to keep forcing, too. Every time he relaxed, Lavinia shrank back into a gray fluffy cat. At last, he forced her head at least to appear as a flatfaced old woman’s head with wild gray hair. “Don’t you want to be turned back?” he asked the face.

  “No,” said Lavinia. “Let me be a cat. Please. So much more restful.”

  He looked up at us. Mum said, “I bet Auntie led her a dreadful dance.”

  Chris said, “Running in the night was fun.”

  “I loved being a cat,” I said. “Let her, if she wants.”

  So Antony Green took his hand away, and Lavinia shrank gladly into a cat again.

  “She had next to no brain, poor woman,” Miss Phelps said, when I kissed her good-bye for rescuing my book. Miss Phelps had saved all the right things, whatever Mum says.

  Mum, naturally, took Lavinia back to London with us in the car. Now she runs adoringly after Mum whenever Mum is in. Chris and I treat Lavinia with the contempt a floppy-cushion cat deserves, but I suppose she cheers Mum up during the times Antony Green disappears.

  Antony Green begged a lift with us to London. Then he went away. He said he couldn’t bear to be under a roof for a while.

  He has other troubles. He turns up every so often, sometimes exhausted and shabby, sometimes ordinary, and once looking very smart, saying he had just flown from New York on the Concorde. And he talks and talks to all of us. One of his troubles is that poor Zoe Green killed herself that morning they plowed up the mound. Antony is sort of resigned, because he thought he had been underground for about a hundred years and had got used to the idea of never seeing his mother again. But he keeps wondering, the way things worked in Cranbury, whether she didn’t give her life instead of him.

  I tell him it is just a stupid waste. If only we’d met her earlier, or later—when we were time traveling, anyway—we could have shown her he was alive. And I can’t think how she missed seeing him when he was capering round the town. But I am glad Mum didn’t go dotty that way when Chris and I were missing.

  Antony Green has trouble adjusting to losing twenty years, too. He says things have leaped onward, and he goes to all sorts of classes and lectures to catch up. When he comes to see us, he sits leaning over our TV as if it was a teaching machine. But his worst trouble is dreaming about being buried. We all know how that feels. Mum says she doubts Antony will ever be quite normal again.

  I sometimes wonder if Chris will be, either. He seems quite usual. But sometimes he gets a wistful wolf look in his eyes and talks about how marvelous it is to run in the night. “Yes, but think of when it rained,” I say. And Chris says yes, he knows, but he has decided not to be a genius at math anymore. He’s going to make films of wildlife. Mum had to buy him a movie camera for his birthday and she says it nearly broke her.

  P.S. That was all six months ago now. I have spent the time rewriting this biography and doing to the end. Sometimes I have added bits and sometimes I have cheated a bit so that it looks as if I wrote more than I did. Chris says if I really wrote that screed at Aunt Maria’s, I wouldn’t have had time to do anything else. But I want it to be good when I finish it. And I want to finish it soon because when Antony Green comes to see us, when he’s in a good mood and we all go out together, things always happen. I want to put those in a book, too.

  The divorce came through. Dad rang up yesterday to say he had married Zenobia Bailey. The silly fool.

  Antony Green has just turned up again. Mum and he came in while I was writing my P.S. and made their Special Announcement. Chris looked up from his stack of animal photographs, and we both made faces. I said we must be the only people in the world whose mother is going to marry an ex-ghost.

  Chris says that’s another thing to blame Aunt Maria for. But I don’t think he meant it.

  About the Author

  DIANA WYNNE JONES wrote more than forty award-winning books of fantasy for young readers. For her body of work, she was awarded the British Fantasy Society’s Karl Edward Wagner Award for having made a significant impact on fantasy and the World Fantasy Society Lifetime Achievement Award.

  www.dianawynnejones.com.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

  Other Works

  Diana Wynne Jones

  Archer’s Goon

  Believing is Seeing: Seven Stories

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  Dark Lord of Derkholm

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  Fire and Hemlock

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  Hidden Turnings:

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  The Merlin Conspiracy

  The Ogre Downstairs

  Power of Three

  Stopping for a Spell

  A Tale of Time City

  The Time of the Ghost

  Warlock at the Wheel and Other Stories

  Wild Robert

  Witch’s Business

  Year of the Griffin

  Yes, Dear

  THE WORLDS OF CHRESTOMANCI

  Book 1: Charmed Life

  Book 2: The Lives of Christopher Chant

  Book 3: The Magicians of Caprona

  Book 4: Witch Week

  Mixed Magics: Four Tales of Chrestomanci

  The Chronicles of Chrestomanci, Volume 1

  (Contains books 1 and 2)

  The Chronicles of Chrestomanci, Volume 2

  (Contains books 3 and 4)

  THE DALEMARK QUARTET

  Book 1: Cart and Cwidder

  Book 2: Drowned Ammet

  Book 3: The Spellcoats

  Book 4: The Crown of Dalemark

&nb
sp; Credits

  Cover art © 2003 by Willam O’Conner

  Cover design by Karin Paprocki

  Cover © 2003 by HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

  Copyright

  Harper Trophy® is a registered trademark of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

  AUNT MARIA Copyright © 1991 by Diana Wynne Jones All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  * * *

  Aunt Maria / by Diana Wynne Jones

  p. cm.

  “Greenwillow Books.”

  Summary: While visiting and caring for Great-aunt Maria, Mig and Chris discover that their “helpless” relative has frightening powers.

  ISBN 0-06-623742-4—ISBN 0-06-447358-9 (pbk.)

  EPub Edition © JANUARY 2012 ISBN 9780062200761

  [1. Great-aunts—Fiction. 2. Magic—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.J684B1 1992

  77-3028

  [Fic]—dc20

  CIP

  * * *

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  The Chronicles of Chrestomanci, Volume I and Volume II

  The Chrestomanci oversees the magic in all the worlds. Omnibus editions of the first four novels featuring Diana Wynne Jones’s most beloved characters. Contains Charmed Life, The Lives of Christopher Chant, Witch Week, and The Magicians of Caprona.

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  The Dalemark Quartet, Volume 1 and Volume 2

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  At Wizard’s University, Wizard Derk’s griffin daughter Elda and her fellow first-year students encounter tyrannical tutors, boring lectures, and truly terrible refectory food.

  Dogsbody

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  The Homeward Bounders

  After Jamie discovers that mysterious beings are manipulating worlds in an elaborate game, they send him bouncing from world to world—until he tries to use their own rules to defeat them.

  Howl’s Moving Castle

  When the Witch of the Waste turns Sophie into an old woman, Sophie finds refuge in the floating castle of a mysterious man. People and things are never quite what they seem in this entrancing fantasy.

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