behind the door here,” said Elaine. “Turn it off when I’ve gone. I’ll only stay a moment to make sure you know what needs doing. We’re all so glad you could come and look after her. Any problems up to now?”
“No,” said Mum, looking a bit dazed.
Elaine strolled past us into the dining-room where she sauntered here and there, swinging the big torch and looking at Mum’s knitting and my notebooks and Chris’s homework piled on various chairs. She was wearing a crisply belted black mac and she was very thin. I wondered if she was a policewoman. “She likes the place tidier than this,” Elaine said.
“We’re in the middle of unpacking,” Mum said humbly. Chris looked daggers. He hates Mum crawling to people.
Elaine gave Mum a smile. It put two matching creases on either side of her mouth, but it was not what I would call a real smile. Funny, because she was quite pretty really. “You’ve gathered that she needs dressing, undressing, washing and her cooking done,” she said. “The three of you can probably bath her, can’t you? Good. And when you want to take her for some air, I’ll bring the wheelchair round. It lives at my house because there’s more room. And do be careful she doesn’t fall over. I expect you’ll manage. We’ll all be dropping in to see how you’re getting on, anyway. So …” She looked round again. “I’ll love you and leave you,” she said. She shot Chris, for some reason, another of her strange smiles and marched off again, calling over her shoulder, “Don’t forget the electricity.”
“She gives her orders!” Chris said. “Mum, did you know what we were in for? If you didn’t we’ve been got on false pretences.”
“I know, but Aunt Maria does need help,” Mum said helplessly. “Where’s the electricity switch? And are there any candles?”
There were two candles. Mum added “candles” to her list before she got into bed just now. Now she’s sitting there saying, “These sheets aren’t very clean. I must wash them tomorrow. She’s not got a washing-machine but there must be a launderette somewhere in the place.” Then she went on to, “Mig, you’ve written reams. Stop and come to bed now or there won’t be any of that notebook left.” She was beginning on, “There won’t be any of that candle left either—” when Chris came storming in wearing just his pants.
He said, “I don’t know what this is. It was under my pillow.” He threw something stormily on the floor and went away again.
It is pink and frilly and called St Margaret. We think it is probably Lavinia’s nightdress. Mum has spent the last quarter of an hour marvelling about it. “She must have been called away in a hurry after all,” she said, preparing to have more agonies of guilt. “She’d already moved down to the little room to make room for us. Oh, I feel awful.”
“Mum,” I said, “if you can feel awful looking at someone’s old nightie, what are you going to feel if you happen to see Chris’s socks?” That made her laugh. She’s forgotten to feel guilty now and she’s threatening to blow out the candle.
There 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 paralysed 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 armour, 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 humour, 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 scandalised 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 realise 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-coloured 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 Zoë Green – Zoë Green has a brilliant mind, dear: she’s read every book in the library – and Zoë Green told Hester Bayley – Hester paints charming water colours, 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 any more. We told Benita Wallins, and she said on no account. Selma Tidmarsh had told her all Miss Phelps
