The Bad Sister (38 page)

Aunt Zita's room had three steps leading up to it, and it was low-ceilinged, so that the birds, which came with the rising wind, and which flew along the passages, leaving trails of phosphorescence on the dim walls, knocked themselves on the low roof above Aunt Zita's head, their fire-bearing tails fanning out into a weave of fiery plumes. Sometimes, when Aunt Zita was getting ready for the ball, and the north wind was charging to get in, and her companions, her grotesques, the agents of her long journeys into memory, stood close to her as she wound the scarf of the night wind around her neck, to go into her room was like going into a cave of fire, or on to a dark island where, in the Icelandic night, an army of smiths and forgers thudded at their anvils and sent up sparks of flame to the polar stars. When the window was opened, and Aunt Zita stepped out on to the sinuous back of the wind, all the flames flickered and danced, like church candles. Then, when she had gone, the birds flew away down the passages again, making a stripe of pale red in the shoulders of the sleeping house.

The room next to Aunt Zita's was never opened, the key had rusted over, and the bell it owned in the basement never rang. It was the room of the daughter Louisa who had tried to run away; and on certain evenings, towards the end of Aunt Zita's visit, when the chrysanthemums were pale with continual rain in the garden, and the grassy path was mud, and there was green light from the sluggish, rolling clouds when Martinmas, and Aunt Thelma, and the season of repentance and bereavement were coming, and Aunt Zita's fire was fading, and the firebirds sat in dull brown rows on the telegraph poles – then I would see my father's grandfather letting himself into that room, to visit Aunt Zita's aunt. It was said that he had never forgiven her. But if my mother put this forward at a meal, and Aunt Thelma looked up at the ceiling in sorrow and excitement, my father would munch his apple as if he had never even heard
of the scandal. My mother was soon silenced; it seemed lascivious to summon dead love, and Aunt Thelma, anxious to show her interest in the house and the enclosing valley, would say:

‘When are we going up to have a picnic tea at the loch?'

Louisa had been walking in the hills and plateaus above the ravine when she saw a figure coming over the crest of the mountain. She was searching for wild flowers for her collection; on the lower slopes she had found harebells, and pale yellow poppies with fragile petals that looked as if they had had the blood sucked out of them. On the heights there was only white heather to be found, or cloudberries like women's lips.

The man who walked down the creek in the ravine came from the other side of the mountains, from the stony land around the Yarrow. If my father and mother and Uncle Ralph made an expedition there – for Uncle Ralph claimed it was a good place to find meteorites, fallen stars for his classification – they had to drive the long way round, for it was a hard walk over the mountains to get there. Also, along the crest of the mountain was a line of seven stones, which marked the murdering-place of seven brothers, struck down by seven brothers of the rival tribe for running off with their womenfolk. My father went up to the stones only when he absolutely needed them. In order to suppress the rumblings of the valley, to bring peace to the house torn by Aunt Zita and my mother, he would go up to the stones and stand beside them. Then the stone men, fearless stone princes, marched down on the overlapping circles of the house and valley. They were inescapable, and even the north wind lurked in the trees when they passed.

Louisa didn't know that the man coming down the side of the hill to meet her had come out of these stones. She talked to him for a while, and he found her a sprig of white heather, which showed as a greenish glow in the duns of the mountainside. He had very black hair, and looked like a Spaniard. Louisa fell in love with him, and he told her it would be best for both of them if they met in the ravine on
the following day and ran away over the mountains, out of her father's power. He told her he could find work as a shepherd to the south of the Yarrow, where the hills and wandering burns had never heard the sound of my father's grandfather's name, or his railways carrying merchandise to the north.

My father's grandfather would have nothing of a daughter of his marrying a shepherd. He overheard poor Louisa's plan, as she confided it to a sister in the nursery, where the berries on the interlocking branches were still fresh and red, and time hadn't yet pinched and withered them. He sent his factor, and two men from the estate office with guns, to frighten off Louisa's suitor and bring her back. When she was captured she was locked in her room. The flowers on the wallpaper, with their round, curly heads, were frightening and oppressive. On the third day of her confinement there, she went out of her mind. And on the third day her lover came to the ravine for the last time.

Louisa lived to a great age, insane. She ate mostly in her room, but when my father was a young man and was responsible for her, she came down on certain occasions. This was before my mother's day, and Aunt Zita's Aunt Louisa had died by the time my mother found herself there – but my mother would say to Aunt Thelma, as my father sat without listening, that she had seen a very old man in Yarrow, when she had last gone on an expedition there, and that she thought he was a descendant of the family of the stones, and had been Louisa's lover. She said he had high cheekbones, and a lot of white hair, but you could see he had been very dark. He had been whittling at an elaborate shepherd's crook, such as they use in those parts. But my father would look straight ahead of him, and it was left for Aunt Thelma to say, with a particular shudder:

‘How extraordinary!'

The trail Louisa had taken, down the valley where trees uprooted by the new force of winter gales lay with their stumps up in the soft poultice of fresh red earth, and the sides of the hills seemed to lean away from each other as
they grew nearer to the loch, to the gape end of the road, was our way, on the night of the second ball, when the cruel week of limbo summer had passed and the equinox had got into the muscles of the wind, making it shout and stamp with fury. But it wasn't completely set in. It dropped its arms sometimes, and lay waiting. Then it renewed the tantrum, kicking at Peg's chimney pot until it fell, and slamming my father's study door so that the papers with neat figures, maps with contours in brown and green of the land, went into chaos on the floor and piled on top of each other. This was why Aunt Zita flew very low, although the wind had been prancing outside her window tall and terrible as the shadow of a wolf – she didn't trust it yet to carry her straight up over the mountains without a fall.

In those years when the invisible war was taking place, and the German bomber pilot filled his nostrils with our soil, soldiers would appear in the valley and shoot at a target they had put up there, on the side of the hill. As we went along, in our train behind Aunt Zita, we saw the pale circles of the target and the bullet holes like dead flies on the board. Aunt Zita's grotesques leaned towards it, staring at the representation of death they saw there, abstract in contrast to their own fleeing, startling figures. If the moon was high, it was possible to see the soldiers, their ghosts, in khaki, firing at the abstract enemy and then falling, shot themselves, into drifts of brown leaves blown off the trees by the north wind. On those nights, when the moon was round and white above the target, a gentle face appeared in the pale, concentric circles. The black holes from the bullets made clusters on its mouth and eyes.

When two winds met in the valley, and the cross-currents brought all the disruption in the village to a head, and summoned Aunt Thelma in Aunt Zita's visit, and it was dangerous to leave for the ball because the north wind, meeting an assailant, a shower of icy arrows from the east, might well drop down, then the stone men marched from their burial ground to restore order. From the sparse heights where Louisa had hunted for flowers and met
her ill fortune, they came down with the majestic dignity of a landslide. Birch trees and elders swooned and fell in the passage of their great stone legs. They cast dolmen shadows ahead, on the half-cut larch woods, and on fields which were already taking their first sheet of frost. Aunt Zita would rise above them, with the wind as her broomstick, and we held tight to the fluttering, ribboning flanks as we went. In their course, they trampled the soldiers, who put up a volley of fire and then ran away. These cairn men, who had been victims of sexual murder, and who had bled to death on the mountain, slowly petrifying, transmogrifying to stone, were unconquerable. The village heard them coming, as animals hear the first shifting of an avalanche.

On the night of the second ball, when we had cleared the black water of loch and had risen into the ravine, the stones were still there, firmly in the earth. The moon was above them, with a weeping face, blotted with shreds of cloud. Louisa was dancing in the stones, weaving in and out, a dance like Strip The Willow. Aunt Zita knew, from her demented dancing, that Louisa foretold calamities, and that the night would end badly. The shadow of the stones fell across Louisa like a hood. Her dance, now far beneath us, was an omen that wrote itself on the flat crest of the hill, her tiny black figure crossing and looping in the stones.

In the years when the war kept Aunt Thelma from coming too early, and autumn had driven us back to the schoolhouse, we sat at our desks, castaways, and the dark fog folded over the rigging on the trees outside. The trunks moved and the mist slipped between them like sea spray. In the pitted bark, where branches had been lopped to give more light for the teacher, we saw the round, horrified eyes of wrecked monsters. The green bracken, which was always exhausted at this time of year, gave off a whitish breath and rose in a rancid sea to our windows. Yet the teacher taught us the Magellan Straits, and Madagascar, and the spice islands. She didn't see the sea outside. In the lassitude of this part of autumn, before the spume of the bracken
turned to orange and the trees recovered their hard edge, the sea filled the whole of the valley with its green body. Sheep grazed on its flanks. The village lay buried beneath it as if it were the future, in its volume the accumulation of a thousand years. Men and women had a fish look, and their mouths were round as they gaped for air in the terrible humidity. At this time, which filled my mother with weariness and my father with philosophical sayings, the house would grow gradually empty and quiet. My mother and father went south. I was sent to Willie and Minnie's, where my dog lived at the time of Aunt Zita's visits. And when I left the school and stepped out into the air that smelt of soaking weeds, I went in the opposite direction from Maurice. He went up the hill, past the Racket Court and past our house, where the rooms, their walls looking down now on tables masked in white sheets, had lost their purpose altogether. I went down the hill, on the slime, to Willie and Minnie's and the row of kennels with barred iron gates, and the dogs that leapt and barked at the sound of Willie's steps.

The dogs led very different lives from Willie and Minnie. In Minnie's front sitting-room there were round poufs covered in rust velveteen, and a settee with a grin of white lace fixed over the back, and rugs on the lino by the fire. There was a smell of baking, and of Minnie's grey flannel skirt that scorched slightly when she bent by the flames, in her dance with ash and poker. Round satiny cushions popped up behind visitors' heads when they sat down, like sudden haloes. Even the table was accommodating, dropping and raising flaps for food or games of whist. The dogs would never be allowed in here. Whereas in the big house my dog could run uncontrollably from room to room, and stop at the scent of my father's mother, or the pale aura of an aunt hovering by his chair, before dashing to a corner and rolling on her back, here her presence would be a threat to Willie and Minnie. When the summer went, whipped by the north wind, the dogs still ran in cells open to the sky, and when it rained they went in through arches to small
rooms and a chipped enamel bowl. They seldom sat. In Minnie's room, when Joe from the town came to call, he was seated immediately and with ceremony. The little skirts of protective material on the arms of the chair swirled as he came down on the seat between them. The barking of the dogs went on through the opening conversation, as if the sound might alert him to their plight. But he talked on. When his second cup of tea was gone, he would open the bag propped beneath him and show them what he had brought.

Joe was overseer at the mill in the town. It made sweaters and cardigans and ‘golfers', from the wool of the sheep that were allowed to wander on the hills and were sometimes rounded up by my dog, to find themselves pressed in a round stone room, awaiting nothing. The mill used cashmere, too, and this Aunt Zita liked, for its long journey from India, and the soft touch which made my father say, if he bumped against her in the hall:

‘What's that nice thing you're wearing?'

It was understood that Joe could go fishing on the lake if he kept my mother and Aunt Zita supplied. But he was a friend of Willie and Minnie's, and he kept the best treasures for them. The ‘fault' that labelled a precious cashmere a reject would be small in the gift offered to Minnie, no more than a spider's leg that had strayed on an underarm seam. For Willie he brought thick V-necks, machine-spun from the home-grown wool. They were the colour of tea, the colour of the burn that came down from the sluice at the Hen Pond after too much rain, or a dead green like the fields and bracken in these suffocating days. Joe said the fish suited the weather. They jumped out of the water at the fly as if they hardly knew what they were doing.

On a day that Joe called, I was allowed to free my dog from the kennel and take her up to the lake with him. The black dogs used by Willie for retrieving fallen birds growled at this release. They ran through the arches in the hope of the sound of the bucket at the back, and Willie with his hands stuck in oatmeal porridge. But there was no sign of
Willie there. It was dark and cold at the back of the Kennels, and the lid of the barrel was on. The black dogs ran back into their cement cells. It was growing dark outside the Kennels, and the sky bulged with the rain it was still holding back, and shoals of midges went past their heads. The dogs set up a terrible howling.