Am I exaggerating her importance? It is a long time ago now, but I rather think I’m not. I suspect that she loomed even larger then than she does in my memory.
She was a big, shapeless woman who always seemed to be wearing several layers of clothing whatever the weather. She dyed her hair a sort of reddish colour and rattled a little from the various bits of jewellery she had about her. (She was particularly fond of amber.) Her nose was beaky and she carried with her everywhere an enormous handbag, the contents of which remained unknown.
When she came she brought with her an atmosphere of unease and discontent. She never allowed herself to fit in with us. If we wanted to go for a walk, she would stay behind. If we decided to stay indoors, she would feel like going out. She rarely took part in any game or expedition we had planned, and when she did there was always a fault to find with the arrangements. On the other hand, almost invariably she wanted, often at the most inconvenient times, to “have a talk” as she put it, with my father. He never refused her demands and so they would go into his study, often for several hours, to have their talk.
I once asked my mother what it was all about.
“They’re probably discussing the Trust,” she said.
I never really understood this Trust. I once asked my father about it but he refused to reveal anything. Many years later, after my father’s death, I searched among his papers for evidence of it and could find nothing. The little I knew came at second-hand from my mother. She said that some distant relation had left a sum of money jointly to my father and Aunt Harriet, and Aunt Harriet was always trying to get more income from it, or do something mysterious called “breaking the Trust” so that she could extract a lump sum for her personal use.
I don’t think my aunt ever really cared about my sister and me as people, but she would ask us the kind of questions that grownups tend to ask – questions that are almost impossible to answer. “How are you getting on at school?” “Have you made any nice friends there?” I don’t think she would have been interested in our answers even if they had been less boring and evasive than the ones we gave her.
Mealtimes were especially grim. In the first place Aunt Harriet was a vegetarian and my mother, out of courtesy I suppose, insisted that we were also vegetarian during her stays. That meant doing without a Sunday Roast which we resented. My mother was not a great cook at the best of times, but she was particularly uninspired in her meatless dishes. Then, during the meal, Aunt Harriet would either be silent in such a way as to discourage conversation from us, or indulge in long monologues about office politics in the library service. This always struck us – that is, my sister and me, and probably my parents too – as horribly boring. We gathered from her talk that work colleagues were always trying, as she said, “to put one over” on her, and she was always defeating them.
In spite of this, you may be surprised to know, I came to be fascinated by her. I suppose it was because she was, at the same time, such a big part of our lives, and yet so remote. Her life in London, apart from those dreary office politics, was a closed book. She never talked about going to theatres or concerts or exhibitions or watching sport. She didn’t even really talk about books. She never mentioned any friends. It was this mystery about her that started all the trouble.
It began, I suppose, one Sunday in September when I was nine, and Aunt Harriet was then approaching sixty. We had just finished lunch and the meal had not pleased Aunt Harriet. It had been, if I remember rightly, Cauliflower Cheese, not one of my mother’s cooking triumphs admittedly, but perfectly edible. My aunt’s complaint had been that my mother should have made an effort to supply something more original from the vegetarian repertoire.
She began, “I’m not complaining, but—” a disclaimer which, paradoxically, often prefaced her complaints “—I’m just saying. You might occasionally like to take a look in a vegetarian cookbook for your own benefit. Of course I don’t mind; I’m just your sister-in-law, but if you were to have guests here, important guests – of course I know I’m not important – and they happened to be vegetarian—”
At this point my father, usually the most patient of men, exploded. He could put up with a lot of things but this was not to be borne, especially as it involved my mother whom he adored. Even so, it was a brief explosion, and fairly reasonably expressed.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, stop talking nonsense, Harriet!” He said, not in his usual quiet voice.
My aunt sniffed, rose from the table and announced that she had never been so insulted in her life and was going for a walk. She then quitted the dining room and a few seconds later we heard the door bang. We ate the rest of the meal in virtual silence.
After lunch my curiosity got the better of me. It was a damp dull sort of day, so the prospect of going out was not inviting even without the possibility of meeting Aunt Harriet, sullen faced, tramping about the countryside. I decided that this was my moment for exploring her room and seeing if I could find any clues to her bizarre behaviour.
There was one spare bedroom in the house for guests, and because few occupied it but she, it was known as “Harriet’s Room”. She stayed there most weekends in the year and, though the furnishings of the room were very impersonal, she had somehow made the place her own.
First of all, there was the smell. It wasn’t an unpleasant smell in itself, but because it was from the perfume she wore it had dark associations. It was musky, spicy, not exactly unclean but somehow not fresh. The atmosphere was heavy with it because, with typical disregard for my parents’ heating bills, she had left the bar of an electric fire on in her room.
The dressing table was crowded with an assortment of bottles of unguents and medicines. Aunt Harriet was, in her quiet way, a hypochondriac, always suffering from some kind of affliction from heart palpitations to boils.
On the dressing table were also a number of black lacquer boxes, some rather beautiful, either painted or decorated with inlaid mother-of-pearl. Tentatively, and knowing that now I was somehow crossing a line, I opened one box, then another, then another.
They all contained jewellery or trinkets, the stones semiprecious and mostly made out of her beloved amber. Many were in the shape of animals or strange beasts of mythical origin. One in particular intrigued me. It sat on a bed of cotton wool in a small box of its own. The box was black like the others with a scene painted in gold on the top in the Japanese style of cranes flying over a lake bordered by waving reeds. The thing inside this box was carved out of amber, a dark, translucent reddish brown, smooth and polished to perfection. It appeared to be an insect of some kind, perhaps a beetle or spider, with a bloated body and eight strange little stumpy legs of the kind you see on caterpillars. The workmanship was extremely fine and, as I now think, Japanese, like the box. Its head was round and domelike, with two protruding eyes almost complete spheres emerging from the middle of the head. Into these amber eyes the carver had managed to insert two tiny black dots which gave them a kind of life and, somehow, malignity. He (or she?) had carved the mouth-parts to give an impression of sharp, predatory teeth – or whatever it is that insects have instead of teeth. It was beautifully made, and horrible. I shut the box quickly.
I turned my attention to the bedside table. It was piled high with books, mostly old and somewhat battered, but some finely bound. I noticed that many of the bindings had little square discolourations as if a label had been removed from their surfaces. I wondered if my aunt had brought them here to read because they were an odd selection. There was an early 19th-century treatise on metallurgy, a volume on alpine plants by a Victorian clergyman with some fine colour plates, a few modern novels in their original dust-jackets and several children’s books. Besides these volumes, I noticed a small plain wooden box, this time not containing trinkets but a neat set of small brushes, a needle-sharp scalpel knife, two pairs of tweezers and small square glass bottles containing fluids such as ink eradicator. I was puzzling over this mysterious collection when I heard someone behind me.<
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“What are you doing in my room, little man?”
I think I jumped several feet into the air in my fright. I had been sitting on the bed facing away from the door and Aunt Harriet had crept in unnoticed. The next moment she had me by the ear.
“I asked you what you were doing. Well … ?”
It was some moments before I was sufficiently in control to reply.
“Just looking.”
“Looking? Looking for what?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you make a habit of snooping around the rooms of your parents’ guests?”
“No!”
“Oh, so you think it’s all right to snoop around in my room. Is that it?”
“No! Let me go!” She had not released my ear.
“What do you think your father would say if I said I found you in my room trying to steal my things? Mmm?”
“I wasn’t stealing anything! You won’t tell him, will you?” I was not afraid of my father as such – he was not a fierce man – but I was afraid of disappointing him. At last Aunt Harriet began to relax her grip on my ear, but she had left it throbbing and painful, full of the blood of embarrassment.
“We shall have to see about that. I may not have to tell him,” said Aunt Harriet in a softer, almost caressing voice which was, however, no more reassuring. “It all depends on whether you’re going to be a helpful boy to me. Are you going to be a helpful boy, or a nasty, spiteful, sneaking boy?”
“Helpful,” I said, instantly dreading the menial task she would almost certainly set me.
“So I should think. All I’m going to ask is something really quite simple—” Suddenly she looked alarmed and turned around. My six-year-old sister Louise had wandered in and was standing in the doorway, her wide blue eyes staring at us in amazement. She had pale golden curls in those days and looked the picture of innocence, but evidently not to my aunt.
“Run away, little munchkin,” she said. “Can’t you see I’m talking to your grownup brother?” Louise had never been called a “munchkin” before. She probably didn’t know what it meant – neither did I, for that matter – but it sounded cruel from my aunt’s lips so she burst into tears. Aunt Harriet stared at her in astonishment. She obviously had no idea why she had provoked such a reaction. After Louise had run off, still wailing, to find my mother, my aunt said, “That child has been dreadfully spoilt.”
I felt that it was my turn to leave so I started to shuffle towards the door. Aunt Harriet hauled me back by the ear again.
“Hold hard, young Lochinvar. Where do you think you’re going? I haven’t told you what I want you to do, yet, have I?”
“You can do it later, Aunt Harriet.”
“Later won’t do. Later will never do.” Then she told me what she wanted. At some time during the week I was to go into my father’s study and from the second drawer down on the left-hand side of my father’s kneehole desk I was to extract a blue folder labelled FAMILY TRUST. I was then to place it under the mattress in my aunt’s room so that when she came the following weekend she might study it at her leisure.
It was a simple task, but it terrified me. I didn’t know which was worse – to defy my aunt or to betray the trust of my father. I was going back to school shortly so I decided to postpone any decision and hope that Aunt Harriet would have forgotten all about it by the time she came next. That, of course, was a vain hope.
When she came the following weekend I avoided her as much as I could until finally she caught me early on Sunday morning as I was passing her door on the way to the bathroom. She dragged me inside and closed the door. She was strong for her age and build.
“Where is it?” she hissed into my face. She wore a Chinese silk dressing gown covered in dragons over a red flannel nightdress.
“Where’s what?”
“Don’t you play games with me, little man. You know perfectly well what I wanted. Why didn’t you get it for me?”
“I couldn’t,” I extemporized. “The drawer was locked.” “Little liar!” she said. “I’ve seen your father open that drawer a thousand times and never once has he used a key. Dear God, can’t you do just one simple little thing for me?”
“Why can’t you get it yourself?”
“Because I can’t. Never you mind. Because I need you to prove to me that you’re not a nasty sneaking little boy, but someone who is loyal and will do his aunt a small favour. I am very disappointed with you. As a matter of fact, I was planning a little treat for you if you had succeeded. I was going to invite you up to London like a proper grownup guest, and I would have given you tea in the Victoria Hotel with toasted tea cakes covered in butter and taken you to see a pantomime, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, and shown you the beautiful and valuable things in my home. You’d have liked that. You like nosing into other people’s property, don’t you? But now you’ll never have any of that because you won’t do a simple thing for your poor old aunt.” She paused for breath and studied me closely. She could see I was unimpressed.
“Do you know what is going to happen to you if you don’t do as I say?” she said, putting her face so close to mine our noses almost touched.
“No,” I said. Then, suddenly feeling that she was engaged in a game of bluff, I added, “And I don’t care.”
“Don’t care, eh?” she said withdrawing her face and studying me intently. “Don’t care was made to care. I want to see that file by Christmas, or else …”
“Or else what?”
Aunt Harriet once again put her huge old face very close to mine. I was almost overwhelmed by her musky perfume. In a loud croaking whisper, she said, “‘I can show you fear in a handful of dust’. Do you know who said that?”
I shook my head.
“A very famous poet called Tom Eliot. I knew him once – rather well, actually. He was very much in love with me at one time. A great many famous men were in love with me in those days, you know.”
I found this impossible to believe then, but years later when I was going through my late father’s things I found a single photograph of Aunt Harriet as a young woman in the mid-1930s. It was a studio portrait and she was posed, rather artificially, elbow on knee, face cupped in her palm, staring at the camera. She wore a long double rope of pearls knotted in the middle as was the fashion and a loose rather “arty” dress. Her dark shiny hair was cut in a page-boy bob which framed a perfectly oval face, like one of Modigliani’s women. Below the fringe of hair her big dark eyes had allure. You might well have described her as attractive; you might also have said that the hungry look in her eyes and the sulky, sensual mouth signalled danger.
“I can show you fear in a spider’s web,” she said. “Do you know who said that?”
Again I shook my head.
“I did. And I can too. So beware, my young friend. Beware!”
With that I was dismissed. I was inclined to regard her threats as empty, or rather that is what I wanted to believe. In the months running up to Christmas she came, much to our relief, less frequently at weekends, but when she did she always found an opportunity to get me on my own. Then she would ask one question: “Have you got it yet?” I would shake my head and that would be that, or so I thought. She seemed strangely untroubled by my refusal to co-operate. Then came Christmas.
She always spent several days with us over Christmas, arriving on Christmas Eve and occasionally lingering until New Year’s Day. Her presence was not so annoying as it might have been because my parents were hospitable during the season. In the company of people other than family Aunt Harriet would occasionally make an effort to be pleasant, provided that she felt that the guests were not beneath her notice socially. It was the one time too when my mother would not make any concessions to my aunt’s vegetarian diet, simply feeding her with the vegetables that dressed the turkey.
Aunt Harriet came that Christmas Eve, as usual with great fuss and circumstance. She did not drive, so my father had to fetch her from the station in the car. It was dark
when she arrived at our house and a light snow was falling, the little specks of white dancing in the wind. I remember looking out of the window of our house as her vast black bulk squeezed itself out of our car and onto the drive. She seemed to regard the snow as a personal annoyance, and flapped her hand in front of her face to brush away the flakes, as if they were stinging insects. As she lumbered towards the front door my father was busy getting her suitcases and parcels out of the boot.
I knew about these parcels from previous Christmases. They were all very grandly wrapped and decked out with tinsel and fancy ribbons, but they never contained anything anyone really wanted. To my father she gave cigars which he very rarely smoked; and to my mother, almost invariably, a poinsettia plant with its piercingly red and green foliage.
I once heard my mother say to my father: “Doesn’t she know I hate poinsettias? Nasty gaudy plants. They look like cheap Christmas decorations. Ugh!”
“Why don’t you tell her?” said my father smiling. “Good grief, no! Can you imagine the scene she’d make?” And they both laughed.
Louise and I always got books, but they were hardly ever new ones, and never what we actually wanted. Some of them, I now think, were probably quite valuable, but even that was a cheat, as I’ll explain later.
My mother, Louise and I were lined up in the hall, as usual, to greet her. When she got to me she murmured, “Have you got it?” I shook my head. She sort of smiled and pinched my cheek in a would-be friendly manner, but she pinched so hard that my face was red and sore for quite some time afterwards. I had a feeling that there was worse to come.
Christmas passed off much as usual. Aunt Harriet refused to come to church, saying that she worshipped God in her own way, whatever that meant, and that anyway the whole business of Christmas was just a debased and commercialized pagan ceremony. When the turkey was being carved she insisted on referring to it loudly as “the bird corpse”. It was no better and no worse than usual. Then, after the dinner, came the present giving.
Best New Horror, Volume 25 Page 20