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.”
I think he meant me to laugh, but Aunt Maria was getting me down too, so I didn’t. I stopped talking to Chris for a while. What with that, and being numbed with boredom, I didn’t manage to speak sensibly to Chris until two whole days later. It was silly. I kept wanting to ask him about his ghost, and I didn’t.
In the afternoons, Aunt Maria’s friends all come. They are the ones she talks about all morning. I had expected them all to be old hags, but they are quite ordinary ladies mostly in smart clothes and smart hairdos. Some of them are even nearly young, like Elaine. Corinne West and Adele Taylor, who came first, are Elaine-aged and smart. Benita Wallins, who came with them, was more the sort I’d expected, stumping along with bandages under her stockings, in a hat and a shiny quilted coat. From the greedy interested looks she gave us, you could see she knew we’d be there and couldn’t wait to inspect us. They are all Mrs Something and we are supposed to call them that. Chris calls them all Missis Ur and mixes their names up on purpose.
Anyway they came and Mum made them all mugs of coffee. Aunt Maria gave a merry laugh. “We’re camping out at the moment, Corinne dear. Now this is Betty and Chris, and I want you all to meet my niece, my dear little Naomi.” She always says that, and it makes me want to be rude like Chris, only I can never think of things to say until after they’ve gone. I am a failure and a hypocrite, because I feel just as rude as Chris. But it just doesn’t come out.
They must have gone straight next door when they left. Elaine marched in ten minutes later, using her two-line smile and uttering steely laughs. When Elaine laughs it is like the biggest of Aunt Maria’s clocks striking – a running-down whirr, followed by clanging. We think this means that Elaine is being social and diplomatic. She flings her hair back across the shoulders of her black mac and corners Mum.
“You’ll have a lot of hurt feelings,” she said, “if you give any of the others coffee in mugs.”
“Oh? What should I do then?” Mum asked, making an effort to stand up to Elaine.
“I advise you to find the silver teapot and her best china,” Elaine said. “And some cake if you’ve got it. You know how polite she is. She’d sit there dying of shame rather than tell you herself.” She shot out the two-line smile again. “Just a hint. I’ll let myself out,” she said, and went.
“Doesn’t she ever wear anything but that black mac?” Chris asked loudly as the back door clicked shut. “Perhaps she grows it, like skin.”
We all hoped Elaine had heard. But as usual she had conquered. Mum got out best tea things when Hester Bayley and three Mrs Urs turned up soon after that. Aunt Maria would not let me help because she wanted to introduce her “dear little Naomi” and when Chris tried to help, Aunt Maria said it was woman’s work. “I don’t trust him with my best china,” she added in a loud whisper to Phyllis Forbes and the other Mrs Urs. Mum ran about frantically and Chris seethed. I had to sit and listen to Hester Bayley, who was actually quite sensible and nice-seeming. We talked about pictures and painting and how horribly impossible it is to paint water.
“Particularly the sea,” Hester Bayley said. “That bit when the tide is coming up over the sand, all transparent, with lacy edges.”
I was saying how right she was, when Aunt Maria’s voice cut across everything. How can Elaine think Aunt Maria would rather die of shame than say anything?
“Oh dear! I do apologise,” Aunt Maria shouted. “This is bought cake.”
“Oh horrors!” Chris promptly said from the other side of the room. “Mum paid for it herself too, so we’re all eating pound notes.”
Poor Mum. She glared at Chris and then tried to apologise, but Selma Tidmarsh and the other Mrs Urs all began shouting that it tasted very wholesome, it was very good for a bought cake, while Aunt Maria pushed her plate aside and turned her head away from it. And Hester Bayley said to me, “Or a wave, with green shadows and foam on it,” just as if nothing had happened at all.
She gave me a book when she got up to go. “I brought it for you,” she said. “It’s the kind of pictures a little girl like you will love.”
“I’m sorry,” Mum said to Aunt Maria after they’d all left.
I think she was meaning she was sorry about Chris, but Aunt Maria said, “It’s all right, dear. I expect Lavinia has put the baking tins in an unexpected place. You’ll have found them by tomorrow.”
For a moment I thought Mum was going to explode. But she took a deep breath and went out into the rain and the wind to garden. I could see her savagely pruning roses, snip-chop, as if each twig was one of Aunt Maria’s fingers, while I put Hester Bayley’s book on the table and started to look at it.
Oh dear. I think Hester Bayley may be as dotty as Zoë Green underneath. Or she doesn’t know better. Mostly the pictures were of fairies, little flittery ones, or sweet-faced maidens in bonnets, but there were some that were so queer and peculiar that they did things to my stomach. There was a street of people who looked as if their faces had melted, and two at least of woodlands, where the trees seemed to have leering faces and nightmare, twiggy hands. And there was one called ‘A naughty little girl is punished’ that was worst of all. It was all dark except for the girl, so you couldn’t quite see what was doing it to her, but her bright clear figure was being pushed underground by something on top of her, and something else had her long hair and was pulling her under, and there were these black whippy things too. She looked terrified, and no wonder.
“Charming!” Chris said, dropping crumbs over my shoulder as he ate the last of the pound-note cake. “Mum’s being told off again, look.”
I looked out of the window into the dusk. Sure enough, Elaine was standing over Mum with her hands on the hips of her flapping black mac, and Mum was looking humble and flustered again. “Honestly—” I began.
But Aunt Maria was calling out, “What are you saying, dears? It’s rude to whisper. Is it that cat again? One of you call Betty in. It’s time she was cooking supper.”
This is the sort of reason I never got to speak to Chris, and never got to write in my notebook either. When I went to guide camp, it was more private than it is in Aunt Maria’s house. But I have made a Deep Religious Vow to write something every day now. I need to, to relieve my feelings.
The next day was the same, only that morning I went out with Mum and Chris obeyed Elaine’s orders and stayed with Aunt Maria. Would you believe this? I have still not seen the sea, except the day we came, when it was nearly dark and I was trying not to look at the piece of new fence on Cranbury Head. That morning we went round and round looking for cake tins, then up and down and out into the country behind, where it is farms and fields and woods, looking for the launderette. In the end Mum said she felt like a thief with loot and we had to bring the bundle of dirty sheets home again.
“Give
