and moved into our spare room in Oxford so that she could take care of us all until Rachel started school and I went to nursery I suppose Dad must have paid her. She wouldn’t have done it for nothing.
It all worked well for about a year, and then Auntie Jackie started to make friends of her own and go out in the evenings a bit more. Before long she’d got a new boyfriend and wanted to move him into the spare room with her. Dad was furious and said he didn’t want some strange bloke in the house with us when he wasn’t around, and they had this huge row and Auntie Jackie walked out. Within three months, she and the boyfriend had got married and moved to Chicago, where he was from, and we didn’t see her again for another eight years.
The rest of the family was outraged that she had deserted us, convinced that the husband was some sort of gangster and it would all end in tears. Which it did eventually, but nothing like as soon as the family had predicted (and no doubt hoped). After twelve years she came quietly back to the UK, and with her share of the divorce payout, she acquired the house in Brighton and started up her business.
During her time in America she had sent gifts at birthdays and Christmas, and cards signed “from your loving Aunt”, and at Dad’s insistence we had dutifully replied with bland reports of our progress and copies of our school photographs, but as far as we knew, Dad never wrote to her himself.
There had been just one visit, the year that Nanny Chris died. I’m afraid to say that it was the memory of this that had given me a pessimistic view of Auntie Jackie’s reliability
I am ten years old, standing in the wings at the school concert, sucking nervously on the reed of my clarinet as I listen to Elizabeth Gallup play Minuet in G on the piano. Although I can’t see them, I can sense, from the occasional distant cough and rustle, the bulky presence of the audience beyond the stage. Even so, I am surprised by the storm of applause that greets the end of Elizabeth’s performance. The hall must be full. I am on next. A lone, metal music stand, like an instrument of torture, glints coldly in a shaft of light from the high hall windows. For a moment I am completely paralysed: my eagerness to perform, to show off and be applauded is brought down by a crippling attack of stage fright.
Something I have known all along, and buried, rises up now: I am not meant to be here, playing in this concert. I am not good enough. It is a mistake.
“Ruth, I’ve put you down to play a solo in the school concert,” my clarinet teacher said at the start of a music lesson, three weeks ago now
“I’m not Ruth. I’m Robyn,” I said. Ruth is a year older. She has done grades. The teacher faltered for a moment before her smile was back in place. “Of course you are. Robyn. Well, you can play something in the concert too, Robyn. Why not?”
The wooden boards, stripped of varnish and slightly soft, quake underfoot as I cross the stage and balance my single sheet of music on the solitary stand. It is mid-afternoon, the hall is uncurtained and well-lit, and I can see the faces of the audience as clearly as they can see me, clearly enough at any rate to be sure that Dad and Auntie Jackie aren’t among them. She is supposed to be here. Dad has taken the day off work so that he can collect her from Oxford station and bring her along. It was a firm arrangement, a promise, and I have been boasting to the whole class for days about my aunt coming all the way from America to watch me. If she doesn’t show up, everyone will think I’m a Big Fat Liar, the sort of girl who invents fantasy relatives to make herself look important.
As my damp, nibbled lips close around the mouthpiece of the clarinet, the other buried thing chooses this moment to surface. I have never, in all my practices, even in the privacy of my own room, played this piece all the way through without mistakes.
If I can just get through the first bar without a misfire. I can never seem to recover from an early squawk. I fill my lungs and attack the first long note, and it emerges pure and clean. Relief.
From the back of the hall comes the swish and clump of the double doors opening and closing as Dad and Auntie Jackie creep in late. Heads turn at the disturbance. I falter, squawk, lose my place in the music and then, just as I find it, the gust of air admitted by the swing doors comes rolling up the aisle towards the stage like a giant wave, snatches my flimsy sheet of music from the stand and lifts it high in the air, where it swoops to and fro above my flailing hand before wafting slowly down into the audience. I turn and bolt into the wings to general laughter and applause.
I was slightly surprised when Auntie Jackie finally returned to live in England that she didn’t get straight back in touch. She and Dad had patched up their quarrel by then and we were her only living relatives, but Dad explained that she probably felt guilty and wouldn’t want to make the first approach in case it was rejected. Besides, Brighton was 110 miles from Oxford – hardly a feasible distance for a day trip. He also had a theory that Mum’s death had hit her harder than he’d appreciated at the time. He’d been too caught up with his own sorrows to notice anyone else’s. “Your mum was always the good, clever, sensible sister who everybody loved. And Jackie was the difficult, wayward one who was always in trouble. She once told me she felt that people were secretly thinking that the wrong sister had died.”
“That’s terrible. Poor Auntie Jackie,” said Rachel, identifying immediately with the naughty sister.
Dad was wrong though. Guilty or not, she did make the first approach: a letter arrived addressed to me and Rachel.
I know I’ve been the world’s most useless Aunt, but I kept you all in my heart while I was away, and never stopped thinking of you…Now I’ve had time to settle in and find my feet, I want you to know that I’m here if you ever need me. Blood is thicker than water, I appreciate that now…
“She’s got a good heart,” Dad conceded, when he read this outpouring, which ran to two pages of badly spelled scribble. “And if it ever came to the crunch, I know she’d be ready to help out.”
When the crunch came, within six months of this casual remark, and we needed somewhere to run to, Auntie Jackie’s had been the obvious choice.
That first evening at Cliff Street Auntie Jackie made us a prawn stir-fry with noodles, which we ate in the kitchen – the only communal area now that I had taken over the basement. This proved to be the one edible meal she could make, and she soon abandoned proper cooking altogether.
Unfortunately I couldn’t do justice to her initial efforts as about two mouthfuls in I began to feel queasy and had to go and lie down. By ten o’clock my stomach was in spasms, my head was in a bucket and I was puking myself inside-out. Living in Oxford I’d witnessed quite a lot of public vomiting – you really had to watch where you put your feet in Freshers’ Week – and I’d always had a horror of being sick. It was such a disgusting spectacle.
“Sorry” I said to Auntie Jackie in between torrents, as she discreetly wiped the toe of her shoe with a tissue.
“You don’t think it’s the prawns, do you?” she said, passing me a wrung-out flannel so I could mop my face.
I shook my head. I knew the culprit was the fishy ham: traces of the strange, beige film were floating in the bilious slop in the bucket. Besides, I hadn’t eaten any of the prawns.
“No, I bet it’s those sandwiches,” said Rachel from the doorway “I thought they smelled funny at the time. Thank God I never
