by Joan Aiken
I picked up the plastic container and, when Mum had gone on her way, peered warily back into the spotless glass of the window I had just polished. The trees hung idle and dark, the grass was bright green, with my brother Claud mowing it over in the far left-hand corner; everything was just as it should be, except that Claud would have to hurry if he was to get the grass cut before the rain came; there was a big mass of thundercloud piling up behind St Ebb’s steeple.
No sign of Aunt Lily.
It was simply imagination, I thought with huge relief. Optical illusion. A trick of the eye. Something close at hand – a floating dandelion puff, maybe – had taken the shape of Aunt Lily’s white parasol (which I knew Mum had gladly hurried off to Oxfam a week after the funeral – all Aunt Lily’s belongings had flown from the house like meteorites the minute she quit it herself; nobody had wished to be reminded of her one minute longer than necessary). The notion of Aunt Lily’s parasol had conjured up the old monster herself. You hear a zoom and see a vapour-trail and you think you see the plane itself. Something like that.
I thought no more of the matter, finished the windows, just before the downpour, collected my five quid from Mum and spent the afternoon bowling with Sandy, bringing him back afterwards for supper, which was Indian takeaway.
The thunderstorm, which had muttered and circled around, and gone away, and come back, all afternoon, was now well into its stride. In fact Sandy and I got properly soaked, cycling back from the bowling-rink at Portsbourne; he came up to my bedroom to dry off and borrow a pair of jeans and a T-shirt.
While we were drying our hair a tremendous flash of violet-coloured lightning made all the lights go out for a moment and illuminated the garden outside my window – the creeper and walnut tree shone a sinister livid green.
“That’s funny,” I heard Sandy say, as we waited for the shattering peal of thunder that followed.
“What’s funny?”
He was glancing towards the window and I didn’t catch his reply, which was drowned in the rumpus; it sounded as if giant babies were hurling about mammoth building blocks in the sky above us.
He didn’t answer, so I repeated my question when the row had died down and the lights had come on, rather flickeringly.
“Oh, nothing. Just a crazy notion I had.”
He was rather silent even after we went downstairs and started on the potato chahkee and mutton dopiaza and onion bhajis.
By and by Claud came in, irritated because the Allington golfcourse had been submerged under a flash flood and the tournament he was due to play in had been put off. My brother Claud has won a whole lot of golf trophies, silver ones. They stand on brackets all over the house. I suppose somebody has to play golf – plenty of people apparently do – but I’ve never yet met a golf player that I liked. My brother Claud is no exception. Even good-natured Sandy agrees that he is a pill.
Now he began putting us down because of our vulgar habits.
“Only erks ride pushbikes and go bowling.”
“Erk yourself,” I said huffily. “Golf is just a snobs’ game.”
At that moment a searing glare of lightning cut out all the lights once more.
“Oh dear,” said Mum as we sat in the semi-darkness. “How long will they be off this time, I wonder? I want to watch Catch ’Em Alive at nine.”
As the thunder let off yet another salvo, close at hand, something clanged in the house.
“What in the world was that?” cried Mum. “Sounded as if a coal scuttle fell down.”
“Coal scuttles don’t fall down, Mother dear,” said Claud patiently. “Coal scuttles are down already.”
Claud is always snubbing Mother and Dad in the same way that he used to put down Aunt Lily every time she opened her mouth. He excels at the art of humiliating people; he could probably make a career out of it. He is also quite a hand at practical jokes – scattering a teaspoonful of sand in your muesli while you aren’t looking, or putting on the speed of the record player from 33 to 45 just before Mum plays her favourite LP. The history teacher at Markham School, Mr Jevons, suffered from a severe breakdown and had to take a term’s leave of absence when he was Claud’s form master. Of course that was a couple of years ago. Claud is in the Sixth now, and acts as if he were the Lord Chief Archangel; but his nature is still the same.
The lights came on again and Dad stumped in, knocking the rain off his hair.
“Blasted weather!” he said. “Just when I wanted to get to work on the bindweed. If I don’t get it dug up this weekend, the whole garden will be covered with the stuff. I’ve never known such a year for it.”
Bindweed is that creeping stuff, wild convolvulus; it has rather pretty pink-and-white flowers, but it’s real murder in the garden; climbs over everything, and the roots go down to Australia. They are fragile thin white brittle things: pull at them and they all break off. You have to dig down, sometimes about four feet, ever so carefully, to get them all out; and you never do get them all out. Dad really hates the stuff.
“Lilies,” the old country men in the village call bindweed, “they botherin’ lilies.”
“Why don’t you use weedkiller?” said Mum as she always does.
“Because of the birds,” said Dad, as he always does.
Claud threw up his eyes, for patience.
“One of your golf cups fell down, Claud,” said Dad, helping himself to mutton and catching Claud’s expression. “It’s rolling around in the front hall.”
“That’s what the clang was,” said Mum.
Claud bustled out, looking annoyed, and we heard him set the cup back on its bracket. Then we heard him give an odd kind of grunt, before he reappeared in the kitchen, slightly paler than usual.
“What’s up?” said Mum. “You sickening for something?”
But he shook his head and said he was going upstairs to sort out his stamps. That’s another thing he does: corresponds with fellow stamp-collectors all over the world.
Three minutes later he was back down, looking very mad indeed.
“Who’s been in my room, messing about with my stamps?”
He glared at me and Sandy.
We said truthfully that we hadn’t been near his room, and Mum confirmed this.
“Well, somebody has, and my stamps are all wet – some of them ruined, very likely.”
“You probably left your window open.” Mum wasn’t very sympathetic. “Now, you lot, hurry up and finish, I want to get the dishes done.”
As we dried the cups, she said, “Just think – it’s the anniversary of Aunt Lily’s death. Remember all the plates she used to break, by putting them in the rack at an angle, so they fell through? And how cross she used to get, and say it was our fault for having a plate-rack that was too big.”
We began happily remembering other things about Aunt Lily: how her eyes used to dart round the table, furtively, to make sure no other member of the family had a bigger helping than hers; how she used to fuss if her pension cheque didn’t arrive on the first of the month, by the first post, and would get Mum to phone the building society; how her bedroom table and window sill were completely covered with little bottles and jars that she referred to as “the remedies”. How her money, pinned inside her corsets was “the wealth”. How she gave off a potent reek of liquorice allsorts and how, after her death, we found a huge tin cashbox, stuffed with them, under her bed.
Aunt Lily, Father’s elder brother’s wife, had nagged Uncle Tom to death – or so Father always says – until he fell out of his bedroom window, or jumped out. Then Aunt Lily, having got through Uncle Tom’s savings, was obliged to come and live with us.
Claud hated her worst, but we all found her a trial.
“I do want to pull my weight in the household,” she was always saying. “I do want to be one of the family.”
But – bar drying a plate or two, and breaking many more – she never actually did anything useful about the place, housework or shopping or assistance with cooking or cleaning. She appear
ed, promptly enough, for meals, and bundled off to her room pretty smartly after them again, saying that she was very tired, and had to lie down.
If it was fine, she’d sit in the garden with her old white parasol. Indeed, all summer long she wore white clothes, droopy old things that looked as if they had come from some jumble sale. “She thinks she’s Miss Havisham,” snarled Claud. If Mum had hung out laundry on the line, Aunt Lily would fiddle about with it, turning things round; “I’m helping your mother,” she’d say with a saintly air. She might pull off a few rose-heads, not cutting down to the main stalk, where it would be some use, but just tweaking off the dead flower, so someone would have to go round after her, doing it over again; or she’d snap off the leaves of a few weeds, not rooting them up, just breaking the stalks.
“Don’t do that, Lily,” Father would say, time and again. “It only makes them sprout thicker, don’t you see? They have to be dug up with a fork. I’ll fetch you one from the tool-shed if you like.”
“Oh, no, thank you, Edward dear. That would be too much for my poor heart. I have to be careful. But I do like to do my little bit; if I pull off the bindweed flowers, that will stop them from seeding. And it makes the garden took just a little tidier.”
“They don’t seed, they spread by rooting,” Father ground through his teeth, but she never listened.
Claud took no stock in the tales about Aunt Lily’s poor heart. “I bet it’s just indigestion because of the way she gobbles her food.”
Claud had a running battle with Aunt Lily about toast. It was his job to make the toast for breakfast, and he always put Lily’s piece at the bottom of the pile, to get soft and flabby. If it was scrambled egg, he’d pour the scrambled-egg liquid all over her toast beforehand, to make it thoroughly damp.
“I don’t like soggy toast!” she’d hiss at him furiously through her dentures, chomping away on the sodden stuff, and Claud would put on his most innocent air, and answer every time, “Oh, don’t you, Aunt Lily? But I specially made it that way for you. I thought you liked your toast to be as soft as possible. I really thought so!”
She’d glare daggers at him but, because Claud is fair and handsome, and looks very like what Father’s brother Tom did when he was young, she could never bring herself to be unduly nasty to him. Whereas with the rest of us she could be really sharp.
“Don’t you speak to me like that, young man! You just wait till you are sixty! Then you won’t think it such a joke to laugh at a poor old lady!”
Having her in the house was like permanent wet weather. Very depressing. But we all supposed we were stuck with her for years and years; despite the talk about her poor heart she seemed in superb general health and never caught so much as a cold.
Then, one evening, just a year ago, there was a power failure. (Later we heard that the cause was Sandy Swithinbank’s father who, with Sandy’s help, had been lopping a rotten branch off the huge, half-dead wild cherry that grows at the bottom of his garden. The branch fell on the power line and cut off the current from half the village for nine hours.)
So there we were, groping about the house with candles and oil lamps.
Claud, who was still sore from a set-to he’d had with Aunt Lily about Sunday TV programmes – Songs of Worship conflicted with Comanche Trail and, of course, being an “old lady” and our guest, she had to have her choice – saw in this situation a chance to get a bit of his own back.
He tiptoed up astern of Aunt Lily on the upstairs landing, as she was cautiously feeling her way from the bathroom to her bedroom door, and suddenly grabbed her from behind, saying, “Boo!”
She let out the most extraordinary gasping wail, like a punctured balloon.
“Ah-h-h-h-h-h!” I heard it through my bedroom door, which was open, and doubled up laughing – it was an incredibly funny sound. Still makes me laugh to remember.
Then she sank to the floor. “Like a stick of boiled rhubarb,” as Claud said.
“Oh – Aunt Lily! Is that you?” he cried, in pretended dismay. “I’m so very sorry! I thought it was Alan. Here, take my arm.”
All kindness and solicitude, he hoisted her up and led her to her bed, where he helped her lie down and covered her with one of her old camphor-smelling shawls. Then, gasping with suppressed laughter, he came to our room.
“Did you hear her? That’ll teach the old so-and-so to grumble because Dad has six mushrooms on his plate and she has only five!”
For once, I and my brother saw eye to eye. Both of us thought that Aunt Lily had richly deserved her fright.
After a while, the electricity came on again and we all resumed what we had been doing before; no one gave Aunt Lily another thought until Father, going up to bed at midnight, noticed that her bedroom light was still shining under her door, so tapped and looked in to see if she was all right, and found her cold and dead in her bed.
It seemed that the talk about her poor old heart had not been a lot of eyewash after all.
She was cremated, by the wish expressed in her will (which left £162, all her worldly wealth, to Father) and the ashes were scattered in our garden, also by her wish.
“I suppose they will be good for the ground,” Father said rather gloomily, as the fine, surprisingly heavy white stuff lay about on the lily-of-the-valley leaves under the big walnut tree. Unfortunately it was a dry month, and the ashes continued to lie there day after day, embarrassingly reminding us of our deceased aunt, and the embarrassing way she had died.
Nobody blamed Claud; no one spoke of it; but he went about very subdued, not at all his usual self, for quite a number of weeks. At last, of course, he recovered, and was worse than before. Perhaps the practical benefits of what he had done suddenly struck him: Aunt Lily removed, he got back the use of his own room (he’d had to share with me while she lived in the house), so, in fact, his evil deed had really paid off.
Not – of course – that he had meant to kill the old girl.
Anyway, after a month it rained, her ashes washed down into the soil, and we all forgot about her; apart from my recent imagined glimpse reflected in the window, and Mother’s musing remark over the drying-up: “Just think, it’s the anniversary of Aunt Lily’s death.”
“Funny you should have remembered Aunt Lily,” observed Dad, wiping the last glass and putting it on the shelf with the others. “Just now, in the front hall, when there was that big flash of lightning, I could have sworn I saw her, in that old white dress of hers, standing outside the glass panes of the front door.”
“Must have been the white lightning,” Mother suggested.
“I expect so. Hark at that blessed rain! The bindweed will be growing an inch an hour,” Dad grumbled. “It’s absolutely smothering the lilies under the walnut tree. And now it’s started up in the rosebed alongside the house. The rain had better stop by tomorrow, that’s all I can say.”
The third step in our staircase tends to crack like a rifle-shot when somebody steps on it. We heard that noise after Father spoke. Sandy, who was sitting opposite the open door into the front hall, suddenly drew in a sharp breath, as if he had toothache.
“Is that you, Claud?” called Mother. “If you’re going up, could you fetch my knitting bag? It’s on the bookcase in my bedroom.”
There was no answer.
“It couldn’t have been Claud,” I said. “Claud is upstairs already.”
“That’s funny.”
Mother went out into the hall, carrying a lamp.
“Claud?” she called. Still there was no answer, so she ran up and fetched her own knitting. Claud could be deaf as a post to other people’s requests when he chose, and he generally did choose.
“The sudden humidity is probably making the floorboards warp,” Dad said when Mother came back. “But surely you can’t see to knit in this light?”
“I don’t have to see when I knit. Can you put me on a record, Alan?”
“No power,” I reminded her.
“Oh, bother! Nor there is.”
&nbs
p; There came a slight lull in the rain, and Sandy said he thought he’d go home. He was rather quiet and glum, and I couldn’t blame him. The house felt strangely cheerless, and not only because of the dim yellow lamplight. Something murky and hostile seemed to be close around us in the sultry dense night.
“I’ll bring your jeans back tomorrow – or the next day,” Sandy said, glancing warily about the garden as he mounted his bike and switched on the light. “So long – see you –” and he was off down the path like a Tour de France contestant. And I was back inside at the same speed because, idiotically, improbably, through the drips of rain from the sodden trees, I could have sworn that I heard Aunt Lily’s thin, complaining whiny voice call, “Claud! Claud! Come here, Claud, I want you.”
I hurled myself inside, slamming and locking the front door, and, thank goodness, at that moment, all the lights came on. I heard Mother’s and Father’s voices from the kitchen, raised in cheerful relief. The dazzling light made my previous thoughts seem even crazier. Just the same, something prompted me to go upstairs. The third step was silent this time – it always is, if somebody else has just stepped on it. I went to Claud’s door and banged on it.
“Hey, Claud? Are you in there? Can I – can I borrow your Latin dictionary? I left mine at school.”
Claud didn’t answer, so I opened the bedroom door. The first thing I noticed was his window, flung wide open, with a pool of rainwater on the sill.
Then I saw the soles of his feet.
They were outside the window.
Upside down.
“Dad – Dad!” I yelled – hysterically I expect – and dashed across the room to the window. The dark outside seemed even more opaque because of the lights having just come on. I could dimly see that Claud appeared to be hanging head down, just below the window; but not what held him there.
Luckily at that moment Father arrived, could hardly believe what he saw, but took command in a practical way.
“Grab his ankles – hold them – don’t let him go! – while I fetch a ladder.”