and we were to be nice to her. So we were all far too nice to Aunt Maria. And suddenly we had gone too far to start being nasty. Aunt Maria kept ringing up. If we weren’t in, or if it was only Chris at home and he didn’t answer the phone, Aunt Maria telephoned all our friends, even Neil Holstrom, and anyone else she could get hold of, and told them that we’d disappeared now and she was ill with worry. She rang our doctor and our dentist and found out how to ring Mum’s boss when he was at home. It got so embarrassing that we had to make sure one of us was always in the house from four o’clock onwards to answer the phone.
It was usually me who answered. Mum worked late a lot around then, so that she could get off work and spend Easter with us. The next thing in my notebook is about Aunt Maria phoning.
Chris has a real instinct for when it’s going to be Aunt Maria. He says the phone rings in a special, gently persistent way, with a clang of steel under the gentleness. He gathers up his books the moment it starts and makes for the door, shouting, “You answer it, Mig. I’m working.”
Even if Chris isn’t there to warn me, I know it’s going to be Aunt Maria because the first person I hear is the Operator, sounding annoyed and harassed. Aunt Maria always grandly forgets that you can look up numbers and then dial them. She makes Lavinia go through the Operator every time. Lavinia never speaks. You just hear Aunt Maria’s voice distantly shouting, “Have you got through, Lavinia?” and then a clatter as Aunt Maria seizes the phone. “Is that you, Naomi dear?” she says urgently. “Where’s Chris?”
I never learn. I always hold the phone too near my ear. She knows London is a long way away from Cranbury, so she shouts. And you have to shout back or she yells that you are muttering. “This is Mig, Auntie,” I shout back. “I prefer to be called Mig.” I say that every time, but Aunt Maria never will call me anything but Naomi, because I was called Naomi Margaret after her daughter that died. Then I transfer the receiver to my other ear and rub the first one. I know that she’s shouting to know where Chris is again. “Chris is working!” I shriek. “Maths!”
She respects that. Chris has somehow managed to fix it in her mind that he is a mathematical genius and His Work Is Sacred. I wish I knew how he did. I would like to fix it in her mind that I am going to be a Great Writer and my time is precious, but she seems to think only boys have the right to have ambitions.
Aunt Maria’s voice takes on a boomingly reproachful note. “I’m very worried about Chris,” she says, as if that is my fault. “I don’t think he gets enough fresh air.”
That starts the tricky bit. I have to convince her that Chris gets plenty of fresh air without telling her how he gets it. If I say he goes to see his friends, then either she says Chris is neglecting his work or she rings his friends to check. I nearly died the time she rang Andy. I want Andy to think well of me. But if I leave it too vague, Aunt Maria becomes convinced that Chris is in Bad Company. She will ring Chris’s form master then. I nearly died when she did that too. Mr Norris asked me about Aunt Maria every time he passed me in the corridor. She obviously scarred his soul.
But I’ve learnt how to do it now. Chris will be surprised to know that he plays tennis every day with a friend who isn’t on the phone. Then I have to do the same for Mum. Mum plays tennis, too, with the phoneless friend’s mum – who is a widow, in case Aunt Maria gets worried about that. Then we get on to me. For some reason, I am not supposed to do anything, even get fresh air. Aunt Maria says, “And what a good little girl you are, Naomi, working away, keeping house for your mother!”
I agree with this, for the sake of peace, though it always makes me want to say, “Well, really, I’m just off to burn the church down on my way to the nudist colony.”
After that she goes on to her latest theories about what really happened to Dad, and then to how upset she is. All I can do there is shout a soothing “Ye-es!” every so often. That part makes me feel awful. But I have to keep listening, because that part always leads to us being the only family she’s got now, and then, “So when are you all coming to Cranbury to visit me?”
This is where I get truly artful. Aunt Maria gets enticing. She says, “Chris can have the sofa, and if Lavinia moves down to the little room, you and Betty can share Lavinia’s room.”
“How kind!” I say. “But I’m afraid Chris has this exam.” You wouldn’t believe how often Chris has exams. Chris doesn’t mind. He gives me suggestions. One thing Chris and I were really determined on was that we were not ever going to visit Aunt Maria in Cranbury-on-Sea. We both have dreadful memories of going there as small children.
Now of course we had other reasons. Would you want to go and stay in the place your father didn’t quite get to before he died? No. So I put Aunt Maria off. I did it beautifully. I kept it all politely vague for months, and we were looking forward to the Easter holidays, when Mum answered the phone one evening I was out and undid all my good work in seconds. I got back to find she had agreed for us to spend Easter with Aunt Maria.
Chris and I were furious. I said I thought it was very unfeeling of Aunt Maria to make us go. Chris said, “There’s no reason to have anything to do with her, Mum. She was only Dad’s aunt by marriage. She’s got no claim.”
But Mum’s guilt was working overtime. She said, “It would be horrible not to go if she wants us. She’s a poor lonely old lady. Dad meant a lot to her. It will make her terribly happy to have us there. We’re going. It would be really selfish not to.”
So here we all are at Aunt Maria’s house in Cranbury-on-Sea. We only got here this evening and I’m so depressed already that I decided to write it all down. Mum said that if I am going to write rude things about Aunt Maria, I’ll have to make sure she can’t read it. So I sighed heavily and decided to use my hardback notebook with the lock on it. I was going to use most of it for my league table of King Arthur’s knights and pop groups, because I didn’t want Chris to find those and jeer, but I’d rather have Chris on to me than Aunt Maria any day. This will be under lock and key when I’ve written it down.
Unfortunately, Mum drove us down in Neil’s car. It’s small and slow, with so little space for people that Chris’s guitar was digging into me all the way; and there are horrible crunching noises from the suspension when you drive with luggage in. Chris and I wanted to go by train. That way we wouldn’t have to go on the road over Cranbury Head. But Mum ignored our feelings and put on her brave and merry manner which annoys Chris so much, and off we drove. Chris and I tried not to look at the pale new section of fence on the clifftop, and I think Mum tried too, but we could sort of see it even when we weren’t looking. There’s a big gap in the trees and bushes there, because it’s not quite spring yet and no leaves have hidden the place. Dad must have swooped right across the road from left to right. I wondered how he felt, in that last second or so, when he knew he was going over, but I didn’t say so. We were all pretending we hadn’t noticed the place.
Aunt Maria’s house failed to cheer us up. It’s quite old, in a street of other old houses, which look very picturesque, all in shades-of-cream-colour, and it’s not very big. It looks bigger inside – almost grand and imposing. It must be the big dark furniture. All the rooms seem dark, somehow, and it smells of the way your mouth tastes when you wake up to find you’ve got a cold. Mum hasn’t admitted to the smell, but she keeps saying she can’t understand why the house is so dark. “Perhaps if she put up cheerful curtains,” she says, “or moved the furniture round. The house must get quite a lot of sun through the garden at the back.”
Aunt Maria greeted us with the news that Lavinia’s mother was ill and Lavinia had gone to look after her. “It doesn’t matter,” she said, stumping towards us with two sticks. “Chris can have the little room now. I can manage quite well if somebody helps me wash and
