The Gabriel Hounds (11 page)

For grotesque it certainly was. I had expected to find Great-Aunt Harriet very different from a child’s far-back recollections of her, but not quite so outlandish as this. As I had told John Lethman, I had retained merely a dim memory of a tallish hook-nosed woman with
greying hair and snapping black eyes who argued fiercely with my father, bullied my mother over the garden, and had a habit of bestowing sudden and exotic gifts on me and Charles, in the intervals of ignoring us completely. Even had she been dressed as she was fifteen years before, I should not have known her. John Lethman had warned me that she would have shrunk, and this was so; and though I thought I would have recognised the jutting nose and black eyes which peered at me from the shadows of the bed curtains, nothing – not even Lethman’s warnings – had prepared me for the sheer outlandishness of the figure which sat there like a Buddha cocooned in coloured silks and gesturing with one large pale hand for me to come nearer.

If I had not known who it was, I should have taken her for some fantastically-robed Eastern male. She was wearing some kind of bedgown of natural silk, and over this a loose coat in scarlet velvet with gold facings, and over this again an enormous cashmere shawl; but these draperies – in spite of the soft and even luxurious materials – had a distinctly masculine air. Her skin had a sallow pallor and her lips were bloodless and sunken, but the black eyes and well-marked brows gave life to the fullish, oval face, and showed none of the fading signs of old age. She had daubed powder lavishly and carelessly, and some of it had spilled over the scarlet velvet. Above this curiously epicene face she had twined a towering turban of white, which, slipping a little to one side, exposed what for a shocked moment I took to be a bald skull; then I realised she must have
shaved her head. This, if she habitually wore a thick turban, was only to be expected, but it was somehow the final touch of grotesqueness.

One thing I would have known her by; the ring on her left hand. This was unequivocally as big and as bright as I remembered from my childhood. I remembered, too, how impressed Charles and I had been by the way my mother and father spoke of the ring. It was a cabochon-cut Burma ruby, the size of a thumb-nail, and had even in those days been immensely valuable. It had been the gift of some princeling in Baghdad, and she wore it always on her big, capable and rather mannish hands. The ruby flashed in the lamplight as, wheezing a little, she beckoned me closer.

I didn’t know whether I would be expected to kiss her. The idea was somehow repellent, but another glitter from the ruby, indicating a stool near the foot of the bed, halted me thankfully.

‘Hullo, Aunt Harriet, how are you?’

‘Well, Christy?’ The voice, little more than a whisper, had a strained, asthmatic breathiness, but the black eyes were live enough, and curious. ‘Sit down and let me look at you. Hm. Yes. You always were a pretty little thing. Quite a beauty now, aren’t you? Not married yet?’

‘No.’

‘Then it’s high time you were.’

‘Have a heart, I’m only twenty-two!’

‘Is that all? One forgets. John tells me I forget things all the time. I’d forgotten you, did he tell you that?’

‘He said it was quite likely.’

‘He would. He’s always trying to make out that I’m getting senile.’ She darted a look at John Lethman, who had followed me up the steps and was standing at the foot of the bed. He watched her steadily, and I thought uneasily. The sharp gaze came back to me. ‘And if I did forget you, it’d be hardly surprising. How long since I saw you?’

‘Fifteen years.’

‘Hm. Yes. It must be. Well, now I come to look at you I suppose I would have known you. You’ve a look of your father. How is he?’

‘Oh, he’s fine, thank you.’

‘Sends his dear love, I suppose?’

The tone, still sharp, was wantonly provocative. I regarded her calmly.

‘If he knew I was here, I’m sure he’d send his regards.’

‘Hm.’ She sat back abruptly in her corner against the pile of pillows; retreating into her cocoon of draperies with the little settling motions of a broody hen spreading herself down on to eggs. I thought the monosyllable was not unappreciative. ‘And the rest of ’em?’

‘All well. They’ll be terribly pleased when they hear I’ve managed to see you, and found you well.’

‘No doubt.’ No one could have called the dry whisper senile. ‘An attentive family the Mansels, wouldn’t you say? Well?’ And again when I didn’t speak: ‘Well, girl?’

I sat up straight on my stool. It was very uncomfortable. ‘I don’t know what you want me to say, Aunt Harriet. If you think we should have come to see you
before, you could always have asked us, couldn’t you? As it is, you know quite well you’ve been sending us all to the devil, solo and chorus, about twice a year for fifteen years. And if you’ll forgive my saying so, I wasn’t exactly welcomed with open arms today!’ I added crisply: ‘In any case, you’re a Mansel, too. You can’t tell me my people don’t write to you just as often as you write to them, even if it’s only to thank you for the latest edition of your Will!’

The black eyes glittered. ‘My Will? Ha! So that’s it! Come to collect, have you?’

‘Well, I’d have a job, since you’re still alive, wouldn’t I?’ I grinned at her. ‘And it’s a heck of a long way to come for sixpence … But if you like you can give me my sixpence here and now, and I won’t bother you again.’

I couldn’t see her expression, just the eyes, shadowed under brows and turban, watching me from the pillows. I caught a glance from John Lethman, half amused, I thought, and half apprehensive, as she stirred suddenly, plucking at the coverings. ‘I could have died out here for all they’d have cared. Any of them.’

‘Look—’ I said, then stopped. Charles had implied that she liked to be outfaced, and certainly up to now I had had the impression that she was trying to needle me. But the Great-Aunt Harriet that I had remembered wouldn’t have talked like that, not even to provoke a retort. Fifteen years seems a lifetime to the young: perhaps at the other end it’s a lifetime, too. I ought to be feeling, not discomfort and irritation, but compassion.

I said quickly: ‘Aunt Harriet, look, please don’t talk like that! You must know quite well that if there was anything you wanted – anything you needed – you’ve only got to let Daddy know, or Uncle Chas, or any of us! My family’s been in America for four years, you know that, and I suppose we’re a bit out of touch, but in any case it was always Uncle Chas you wrote to, and I understood from him – I mean, I thought you’d always made it so very clear that you wanted to stay out here, live on your own terms …’ I made a vague, wide gesture that took in the neglected room and beyond it the dark confines of the sleeping palace. ‘You must surely know that if there was anything – if you were ill – if you really did want someone to come here, or needed help of some kind—’

Deep in its shadowed corner the bundle on the bed was so still that I faltered. The lamp had been burning low, but now some trick of the draught or unevenness of the wick sent up a tongue of light, and I saw the quick glitter of her eyes. It wasn’t pathos at all. The instinct that was forbidding me to feel compassion had been right.

‘Aunt H!’ I said roundly. ‘Are you sending me up? I mean, you’re just teasing, aren’t you? You must know you’re talking nonsense!’

‘Hm. Nonsense, is it? Meaning that I have got a devoted family?’

‘Well, heavens, you know what families are! I don’t suppose ours is any different from any other! You must know quite well you could cut us all off with sixpence till you’re blue in the face, but we’re still your family!’

‘Hear that, John?’

He was looking, I thought, acutely uncomfortable. He opened his mouth to say something, but I cut across it:

‘You know quite well what I mean! Just that if you needed anything, or anything happened to you – well, London to Beirut only takes six hours, and someone would be here and raising the place before you even knew you wanted them. Daddy always says that’s what a family is, it’s just collective insurance; as long as you’re alive and well it just goes ticking along and takes no notice, but let anything go wrong, and the company moves in. Heavens, I do what I like, and nobody stops me going where I want to, but I know quite well that if I was in the least spot of trouble and got on the phone to Daddy, he’d be here in three seconds!’ I looked up at John Lethman, hesitated, then added decisively: ‘And don’t start teasing Mr Lethman as well. It doesn’t matter what you say to me, but I might as well make something else clear here and now, even if I may be speaking out of turn … Everybody’ll be as pleased as Punch that he’s here with you, so you’d better be nice to him, because the longer he stays the better! For goodness’ sake, we’re not neglecting you – we’re just letting you get on with it the way you want to, and you seem to be making a pretty good job of it, if you ask me!’

She was laughing openly now, the cocoon heaving to the wheezing breaths. The big hand went up, and the ruby flashed. ‘All right, child, all right, I was teasing you! A fighter, aren’t you? I always did like a fighter.
No, I don’t make it easy for people to get in to see me; I’ve had too much trouble that way, and say what you like, I’m getting old. You were very insistent, weren’t you? If you’re so full of this “live and let live” of yours, why did you come?’

I grinned. ‘You’d be annoyed if I said it was family feeling. Call it curiosity.’

‘What had you heard to make you so curious?’

‘What had I heard? You must be joking! I suppose you’re so used to living in a place like this and hedging yourself with legends like a – well, like a—’

‘Superannuated Sleeping Beauty?’

I laughed. ‘Bang on! I mean, yes, if you like to put it that way! But seriously, you’re a celebrity, you knew that! Everybody talks about you. You’re one of the sights of the Lebanon. Even if I’d been no relation I’d have been told all about you and urged to come and look at Dar Ibrahim; so when I realised I had a copper-bottomed excuse to call to see you, and even bull-doze my way into the palace – well, boiling oil might have stopped me, but nothing short of that.’

‘Make a note of that, John; boiling oil is what we need. Hm, you’re a Mansel to your claw-tips, aren’t you? So everybody talks about me, do they? Who’s “everybody”?’

‘Oh, this was just someone in the hotel in Beirut. I was planning a trip—’

‘Hotel? Who were you chattering about me to in a hotel in Beirut?’ She made it sound as if it were a brothel in Cairo.

‘Not exactly chattering. It was the desk clerk, as it
happens. I was planning a trip up to the Adonis Source at Afka, and he told me I’d be passing near Dar Ibrahim, and—’

‘Which hotel?’

‘The Phoenicia.’

‘It’s new since you were in Beirut,’ put in John Lethman. It was the first time he had spoken. He still seemed ill at ease. ‘It’s the big one I told you about, on the harbour.’

‘The what? Phoenicia? All right, go on, what were they saying about me in this hotel?’

‘Nothing much, really,’ I said. ‘The desk clerk didn’t know I was a relation of yours, he was just telling me this was an interesting place, and he said I might as well get my driver to come back by Sal’q and stop so that I could get a view of the palace. Then I told him I knew your family – I still didn’t tell him who I was – and asked how you were and if he’d heard anything about you.’

‘And what did he tell you?’

‘Only that as far as he knew you were perfectly all right, but that you hadn’t been outside the palace for quite a time, and he told me you’d been ill a short while back, and had a doctor from Beirut—’

‘He knew that?’

‘Well, heavens, it was probably in all the papers! You’re one of the local legends, after all! Didn’t Mr Lethman tell you, I rang the doctor’s house up to try to get news of you—’

‘Yes, yes, yes, he told me. A lot of use that would have been. The man was a fool. A good thing he’s
gone, a very good thing … Much better now, much better.’ The shawl had slipped; she pulled at it with a sort of flouncing irritation, suddenly pettish, and I heard her muttering to herself what sounded like ‘Ringing up about me,’ and ‘Chattering about me in hotels,’ in a whisper which was all at once not dry and sharp at all, but vague and blurred. Her head shook, so that the turban was dislodged even further, exposing a little more of that shaved scalp.

I looked away, repelled, and trying not to show it. But wherever I looked was a reminder of a slovenly eccentricity; even the clutter of medicine bottles on the chest was dusty, and dust gritted under my shoes as I shifted my feet on the floor. The room, big as it was, felt stuffy, and my skin prickled. I found myself suddenly longing to escape into fresh air.

‘Christy … Christy …’ The wheezing mutter jerked my attention back to her. ‘Stupid name for a girl, What’s it short for?’

‘Christabel. It was the nearest they could get to Christopher.’

‘Oh.’ She plucked at the covers again. I got the sharp impression that the eyes watching me from the shadows were by no means forgetful; that this was a game she played when it suited her. The impression wasn’t pleasant. ‘What were we talking about?’

I pulled myself together. ‘The doctor. Dr Grafton.’

‘I was not ill; the man was a fool. There’s nothing wrong with my chest, nothing at all … In any case, he’s left the Lebanon. Wasn’t there some chatter about
him, too, John? Some scandal? Didn’t he go back to London?’

‘I believe so,’ said Lethman.

I said: ‘They told me so when I rang up. They didn’t say anything else about him.’

‘Hm,’ she said, and all the dry malice was back in her voice. ‘Probably put his plate up in Wimpole Street by now and making a fortune.’

‘I never heard any scandal, but it’s true he’s gone. They say his practice went to a very good man.’ John Lethman gave me a quick, speaking look, and then leaned forward. ‘Now don’t you think you should have a rest, Lady Harriet? It’s time for your tablets, so if you’ll allow me, I’ll ring for Halide, and see Miss Mansel back myself—’

‘No,’ said Great-Aunt Harriet uncompromisingly.

‘But, Lady Harriet—’

‘I tell you, boy, stop fussing. I won’t take the tablets yet, they make me sleepy. You know I don’t like taking them. I’m not tired at all, and I’m enjoying the gel’s visit. Stay where you are, child, and talk to me. Entertain me. Tell me where you’ve been and what you’ve been doing. How long have you been in Beirut?’