Aunt Maria (3 page)

T
here is a ghost in Chris's room.

I wrote that two days ago. Since then events have moved so fast that snails are whizzing by, blurred with speed. I am paralyzed with boredom, Mum has knitted three sleeves for one sweater for the same reason, and Chris is behaving worse and worse. So is Aunt Maria. We all hate Elaine and the other Mrs. Urs.

How can Aunt Maria bear living in Cranbury with no television? The days have all gone the same way, starting with Mum leaping out of bed and waking me up in her hurry to get breakfast as soon as Aunt Maria begins thumping her stick on the floor. While I'm getting up, Aunt Maria is sounding off next door. “No, no, dear. It's quite fun to eat runny egg for a change—I usually tell Lavinia to do them for five and a half minutes, but it doesn't matter a bit.” That was the last two days. Today Mum must have got the egg right, because Aunt Maria was on about how interesting to eat flabby toast, dear. The noise wakes Chris up and he comes forth like the skeleton in the cupboard. Snarl, snarl!

Chris is not usually like this. The first morning, I asked him what was the matter and he said, “Oh, nothing. There's a ghost in my room.” The second morning he wouldn't speak. Today I didn't speak, either.

Mum has just time to drink a cup of coffee before Aunt Maria is thumping her stick again, for us to get her up. We have to hook her into a corset thing which is like shiny pink armor, and you should just see her knickers. Chris did. He said they would make good trousers for an Arabian dancing girl, provided the girl was six feet tall and highly respectable. I thought of Aunt Maria with a jewel in her tummy button and was nearly sick laughing. Aunt Maria made me worse by saying, “I have a great sense of humor, dears. Tell me the joke.” That was while Chris and I were helping her downstairs. She was in full regalia by then, in a tweed suit and two necklaces, and Mum was trying to make Aunt Maria's bed the way Lavinia is supposed-to-do-it-but-it-doesn't-matter-dear.

She comes and sits in state in the living room then. It is somehow the darkest room in the house, though sun streams in from the brown garden. One of us has to sit there with her. We found that out the first day when we were all getting ready to go shopping for the things on Mum's huge list. Chris was saying sarcastically that he couldn't wait to see some of the hot spots in town, when Aunt Maria caught up with what we were talking about.

She said, in her special urgent scandalized way, “You're not going
out
!”

“Yes,” said Chris. “We are on holiday, you know.”

” Mum shut him up by saying, “
Christian!
” and explained about the shopping.

“But suppose I fall!” said Aunt Maria. “Suppose someone calls. How shall I answer the door?”

“You opened the door to us when we came,” I said.

Aunt Maria promptly went all gentle and martyred and said none of us knew what it was like to be old, and did we realize she sometimes never saw a soul for a whole month on end? “You go, dears. Get your fresh air,” she said.

Naturally Mum got guilty at that, and, just as naturally, it was me that had to stay behind. I spent the next three hundred hours sitting in a little brown chair facing Aunt Maria. She sits on a yellow brocade sofa with knobs on and silk ropes hooked around the knobs to stop the sofa's arms falling down. Her feet are plonked on the wine-colored carpet and her hands are plonked on her sticks. Aunt Maria is a heavy sort of lady. I keep thinking of her as huge and I keep being surprised to find that she is nothing like as tall as Chris, and not even as tall as Mum. I think she may only be as tall as me. But her character is enormous—right up to the ceiling.

She talks. It is all about her friends in Cranbury. “Corinne West and Adele Taylor told Zoe Green—Zoe Green has a brilliant mind, dear: she's read every book in the library—and Zoe Green told Hester Bailey—Hester paints charming watercolors, all real scenes, everyone says she's as good as van Gogh—and Hester said I was quite right to be hurt at what Miss Phelps had been saying. After all I'd done for Miss Phelps! I used to send Lavinia over to her, but I wonder if I should anymore. We told Benita Wallins, and she said on no account. Selma Tidmarsh had told her all Miss Phelps had said. Selma and Phyllis—Phyllis Forbes, that is, not Phyllis West—wanted to go round and speak to Miss Phelps, but I said ‘No, I shall turn the other cheek.' So Phyllis West went to Ann Haversham and said…”

On and on. You end up feeling you are in a sort of bubble filled with that getting-a-cold smell, and inside that bubble is Cranbury and Aunt Maria, and that is the entire world. It is hard to remember there is any land outside Cranbury. I got into a kind of daze of boredom. It was humming in my ears. When you get that way, the most ordinary things get violently exciting. I know when I looked round and saw a cat on the living room windowsill, it was like Christmas or my birthday or when Chris's friend Andy notices me. Wonderful! And it was one of those gray, fluffy cats with a flat, silly face that are normally utterly boring. It was staring intensely in at us through the glass, opening its mouth and dribbling down its gray ruff, and I stared back into its flat yellow eyes—they were slightly crossed—as if that cat was my favorite friend in all the world.

“You're not attending, dear,” said Aunt Maria, and she turned to see what I was staring at. Her face went red. She levered herself up on one stick and stumped toward the window, slashing the air with her other stick. “Get off! How dare you sit on my windowsill!” The cat glared in stupid horror and fled for its life. Aunt Maria sat back down, puffing. “He comes in my garden all the time,” she said. “After birds. As I was saying, Ann Haversham and Rosa Brisling were great friends until Miss Phelps said that. Now you mustn't think I'm annoyed with Amaryllis Phelps, but I was hurt—”

I thought she was horrid to that cat. I couldn't listen to her after that. I sat and wondered about Chris's ghost. It could have been a joke. But if it wasn't—I didn't know whether I wanted it to be Dad's ghost trying to tell Chris where his body was, or not. The idea made my teeth want to chatter, and I had a sort of ache of fear and excitement.

“Do attend, dear,” said Aunt Maria. “This is interesting.”

“I am,” I said. She had been talking about Elaine-next-door. I had sort of heard. “We met Elaine,” I said. “She came in last night with a torch.”

“
You
mustn't call her Elaine, dear,” Aunt Maria said. “She's Mrs. Blackwell.”

“Why not?” I said. “She said Elaine.”

“That's because I always call her that,” Aunt Maria said. “But if you do, it's rude.”

So I'm calling her Elaine. Elaine came marching in again, in her black mac but without her torch, at the same time as Chris and Mum. I'd heard Chris's voice and then Mum's and I jumped up, feeling I was being let out of prison. Something was actually happening! Then the living room door opened and it was Elaine. “Don't go, dear,” Aunt Maria said to me. “I want you here to be introduced.”

I had to stand there, while Elaine took no notice of me, as before. She went to Aunt Maria and kissed her cheek. “They've done your shopping,” she said, “and I told them where to put things. Is there anything else you want me to tell them?”

“They're being very good,” Aunt Maria said. She had gone all merry. “They're trying quite hard. I don't expect them to get anything right straight away.”

“I see,” said Elaine. “I'll go and tell them to make an effort then.” She was not joking. She was like a police chief taking her orders from the Great Dictator.

“Before you do,” Aunt Maria said merrily, “I want you to meet my new little Naomi. Such a dear little great-niece!”

Elaine turned her face toward me. “Mig,” I said. “I prefer being called Mig.”

“Hello, Naomi,” said Elaine, and she strode out of the room again. When I went after her, I found her standing over Mum and Chris and scads of grocery bags, saying, “And you really must make sure she is never left alone.”

Mum, looking very flustered, said, “We left Mig here.”

“I know,” Elaine said grimly, meaning that was what she was complaining of. Then she turned to Chris. Her mouth made the stretch with two creases at the ends. “You,” she said. “You have the look of a gallant young man. I'm sure you'll keep your aunt company in future, won't you?”

We think it was meant to be flirtatious. We stared at one another as the back door shut crisply behind Elaine. “Well!” Mum said. “You seem to have made a hit, Chris! And talking of hits, hit her I shall if she gives me one more order. Who does she think she is?”

“Aunt Maria's chief of police,” I said.

“Right!” said Mum.

Then we unpacked all the loads of provisions, and guess what? We found a deep freeze in the cupboard beside the sink, absolutely stuffed with food. There was ice cream and bread and hot dogs and raspberries in it. Half the stuff Mum had bought was things that were there already. Chris sorted through it with great zeal. Mum is always amazed at how much he eats and keeps saying, “You
can't
still be hungry!” I have tried to explain, from my own experience. It's a sort of nagging need you have, even when you feel full. It's not starving, just that you keep wanting more to eat.

“Yes,” says Mum. “That's what I mean. How can you find room? Oh, dear. We wronged poor Lavinia again. She left Aunt Maria very well supplied, after all.”

Chris taxed Aunt Maria with this over lunch. Aunt Maria said loftily, “I never pry into the kitchen, dear. But frozen food is very bad for you.” And before Chris could point out that Aunt Maria was at that moment eating frozen peas, Aunt Maria rounded on Mum. “I was so ashamed, dear, when Elaine came in. The thought of her seeing you and Naomi in that state. And you went
out
like that, dear.”

“What state? Out like what?” we all said.

Aunt Maria lowered her eyes. “In trousers!” she whispered, hushed and horrified. Mum and I stared from Mum's jeans to mine and then at one another. “And Naomi's hair so untidy,” Aunt Maria continued. “She must have forgotten to plait it today. But of course you'll both change this afternoon, won't you? In case any of my friends call.”

“And what about me?” Chris asked sweetly. “Shall I wear a skirt, too?” Aunt Maria pretended not to hear, so he added, “In case any of your friends call?”

“These peas are really delicious,” Aunt Maria said loudly to Mum. “I wouldn't have thought peas were in season yet. Where did you find them?”

“They're frozen,” Chris said, even louder, but she pretended not to hear that, either.

It is very hard to know how deaf Aunt Maria is. Sometimes she seems like a post, like then, and sometimes she can sit in the living room and hear what you whisper in the kitchen with both doors shut in between. Chris says the rule is she hears if you don't want her to. Chris is thoroughly exasperated by that. He keeps trying to practice his guitar. In the little room halfway upstairs, with his door shut, Mum and I can hardly hear the guitar, but whenever Chris starts to play, Aunt Maria springs up, shrieking, “What's that noise? There's a burglar trying to break into the house!” I know how Chris feels, because Aunt Maria does that when I have my Walkman on, too. Even if I turn it so low hardly a whisper comes into the earphones, Aunt Maria shrieks, “What's that noise? Is the tank in the loft leaking?”

Mum has made us both stop. “It
is
her house, loves,” she said when we argued. “We're only her guests.”

“On a working holiday!” Chris snarled. Mum was cleaning Aunt Maria's brass, because Aunt Maria said that this was Lavinia's day for doing it, but she didn't expect Mum to do it.

On the same grounds, Mum changed into her good dress and made me wear a skirt. I pointed out I've only got one skirt with me—my pleated one—and Mum said, “Mig, I'll buy you another. We
are
her guests.”

“Oh good,” said Chris. “Is that a rule—visitors have to do what the owner of the house wants? Next time Andy comes round in London I'll make him kiss Mig.”

That made me hit Chris, and Aunt Maria shrieked that slates were falling off the roof. “See what I mean?” said Chris. “It
is
her house. Pieces fall off if you hit me. Wicked, destructive Mig, knocking nice Auntie's house down.”