Aunt Maria (25 page)

“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 that 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.

It was a little gray room with one little gray window looking out onto the foggy woods. What woke me was the sound of the excavators starting up to finish leveling the mound. That told me at once where I was. Even if I hadn't heard them, the smell would have told me—like a school really, only thicker and chillier. I jumped up. The first thing I saw was my old mildewy exercise book lying on the gray locker by the bed and a pen beside it. “The Story of the Twin Princesses.” I grabbed it up and opened it, and found Aunt Maria's note written under the title on the first page. She has teddy-bearish writing. I knew the note was meant to make me feel humble and contrite. But it didn't. There were no spells on me now. I suppose if I was going to be her new Naomi, I had to have my own free will. I went and tried the door.

It wasn't locked. I stormed out into the gray corridor and came face to face with Phyllis Forbes. Her pink schoolgirl face was rather irritable.

“Didn't you hear the bell?” she said. “Get up at once, you lazy girl. Breakfast is half finished.”

“Why should I?” I said. “I don't belong here.”

“You do now,” she said. “Get dressed or starve.”

I was hungry. My clothes were on a chair. I went back in the room and dressed and Phyllis Forbes stood over me. I hated her. But I hated her much more by the end of breakfast.

The orphans were all downstairs in a long gray room quietly eating Muesli and drinking watery milk from plastic glasses. Phyllis Forbes shoved me down at a bench by the nearest long table and went stamping off. The orphans all looked at me with identical solemn clone expressions. They were all younger than me. That made me rather dejected.

“Don't just sit there.
Do
something!” I called out at them. “You all got filled with stuff from the green box. It must have made
some
difference!”

They just stared, and their eyes all shifted in unison to Zenobia Bailey. She was dressed like a nurse, in the same way as Phyllis Forbes. She hustled up, clacking her shoes, and clapped a bowl of Muesli down in front of me. “Milk's in the jug,” she said. “Spoons in the box there.”

“Do you work here?” I said.

“I give my time three mornings a week,” she said. She sounded very righteous.

I wondered if she recognized me. “How generous,” I said. “Do you give people anything but Muesli? I hate Muesli. It's like mouse doo.”

“You'll eat it,” she said. “It's nourishing.”

“No, I won't. I'll throw up,” I said. “How about a crust of dry bread, instead?”

Zenobia Bailey sighed. “Phyllis!” she called out in a weary voice. “There's one being ornery here.”

Phyllis Forbes came zooming along the gray room and glared at me. “Oh, yes,” she said. “This one will be. She has much too good an opinion of herself. Are you going to eat up like a good girl?” she said to me.

“No,” I said. “I hate Muesli.”

“Then you'll eat it all up,” she said with a little sort of smile.

And I somehow had to. I spooned the spiky gray mush up, and choked, and spooned again, and the raisins seemed even more like dead flies than usual, but I still had to eat them. Phyllis Forbes hadn't done anything to my feelings. She had just put a sort of transparent bag around them, so that they bulged and struggled inside where I couldn't get at them. I had to sit dutifully there eating Muesli.

When I'd finished, she clapped her hands. “Come along now, children,” she called. “Activity time.” All the orphans got up obediently and filed out of the gray room, while she stood against the wall with her arms folded, watching. Elaine isn't Aunt Maria's only policewoman, I thought. I got up and went over to her.

“What is activity time?” I said. Then I burped Muesli and thought I was going to be sick.

She gave me a malicious smile. “The boys go for gymnastics,” she said. “The girls have dancing. It trains the muscles.”

“I want to do gymnastics,” I said.

“But you'll do dancing,” she said. “That's what young ladies do. This way.”

I knew she could make me, so I went where she pushed me, looking as rebellious as I dared.