“Of course I am, Henry.”
“I’m sorry, Aunt Augusta, but a bank manager’s pension is not a generous one.”
“I shall naturally pay all expenses. Give me another glass of wine, Henry. It’s excellent.”
“I’m not really accustomed to foreign travel. You’d find me…”
“You will take to it[67] quickly enough in my company. The Pullings have all been great travellers. I think I must have caught the infection through your father.”
“Surely not my father… He never travelled further than Central London.”
“He travelled from one woman to another, Henry, all through his life. That comes to much the same thing. New landscapes, new customs. The accumulation of memories. A long life is not a question of years. A man without memories might reach the age of a hundred and feel that his life had been a very brief one. Your father once said to me, ‘The first girl I ever slept with was called Rose. Oddly enough she worked in a flower shop. It really seems a century ago.’ And then there was your uncle…”
“I didn’t know I had an uncle.”
“He was fifteen years older than your father and he died when you were very young.”
“He was a great traveller?”
“It took an odd form,” my aunt said, “in the end.” I wish I could reproduce more clearly the tones of her voice. She enjoyed talking, she enjoyed telling a story. She formed her sentences carefully like a slow writer who foresees ahead of him the next sentence and guides his pen towards it. Not for her the broken phrase, the lapse of continuity. There was something classically precise, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say old-world, in her diction. The bizarre phrase, and occasionally, it must be agreed, a shocking one, gleamed all the more brightly from the old setting. As I grew to know her better, I began to regard her as bronze rather than brazen, a bronze which has been smoothed and polished by touch, like the horse’s knee in the lounge of the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo, which she once described to me, caressed by generations of gamblers.
“Your uncle was a bookmaker known as Jo,” Aunt Augusta said. “A very fat man. I don’t know why I say that, but I have always liked fat men. They have given up all unnecessary effort, for they have had the sense to realize that women do not, as men do, fall in love with physical beauty. Curran was stout and so was your father. It’s easier to feel at home with a fat man.[68] Perhaps travelling with me, you will put on a little weight yourself. You had the misfortune to choose a nervous profession.”
“I have certainly never banted for the sake of a woman,” I said jokingly.
“You must tell me all about your women one day. In the Orient Express we shall have plenty of time for talk. But now I am speaking to you of your Uncle Jo. His was a very curious case. He made a substantial fortune as a bookmaker, yet more and more his only real desire was to travel. Perhaps the horses continually running by, while he had to remain stationary on a little platform with a signboard HONEST JO PULLING, made him restless. He used to say that one race meeting merged into another and life went by as rapidly as a yearling out of Indian Queen. He wanted to slow life up and he quite rightly felt that by travelling he would make time move with less rapidity. You have noticed it yourself, I expect, on a holiday. If you stay in one place, the holiday passes like a flash, but if you go to three places, the holiday seems to last at least three times as long.”
“Is that why you have travelled so much, Aunt Augusta?”
“At first I travelled for my living,” Aunt Augusta replied. “That was in Italy. After Paris, after Brighton. I had left home before you were born. Your father and mother wished to be alone, and in any case I never got on very well with Angelica. The two A’s we were always called. People used to say my name fitted me because I seemed proud as a young girl, but no one said my sister’s name fitted her. A saint she may well have been[69], but a very severe saint. She was certainly not angelic.”
One of the few marks of age which I noticed in my aunt was her readiness to abandon one anecdote while it was yet unfinished for another. Her conversation was rather like an American magazine where you have to pursue a story, skipping from page twenty to page ninety-eight and turning over all kinds of subjects in between: childhood delinquency, some novel cocktail recipes, the love life of a film star, and even quite a different fiction from the one so abruptly interrupted.
“The question of names,” my aunt said, “is an interesting one. Your own Christian name is safe and colourless. It is better than being given a name like Ernest, which has to be lived up to. I once knew a girl called Comfort and her life was a very sad one. Unhappy men were constantly attracted to her simply by reason of her name, when all the time, poor dear, it was really she who needed the comfort from them. She fell unhappily in love with a man called Courage, who was desperately afraid of mice, but in the end she married a man called Payne and killed herself – in what Americans call a comfort station[70]. I would have thought it a funny story if I hadn’t known her.”
“You were telling me about my Uncle Jo,” I said.
“I know that. I was saying that he wanted to make life last longer. So he decided on a tour round the world (there were no currency restrictions in those days), and he began his tour curiously enough with the Simplon Orient, the train we are travelling by next week. From Turkey he planned to go to Persia, Russia, India, Malaya, Hong Kong, China, Japan, Hawaii, Tahiti, U.S.A., South America, Australia, New Zealand perhaps – somewhere he intended to take a boat home. Unfortunately he was carried off the train at Venice right at the start, on a stretcher, after a stroke.”
“How very sad.”
“It didn’t alter at all his desire for a long life. I was working in Venice at the time, and I went to see him. He had decided that if he couldn’t travel physically, he would travel mentally. He asked me if I could find him a house of three hundred and sixty-five rooms so that he could live for a day and a night in each. In that way he thought life would seem almost interminable. The fact that he had probably not long to live had only heightened his passion to extend what was left of it. I told him that, short of the Royal Palace at Naples, I doubted whether such a house existed. Even the Palace in Rome probably contained fewer rooms.”
“He could have changed rooms less frequently in a smaller house.”
“He said that then he would notice the pattern. It would be no more than he was already accustomed to, travelling between Newmarket, Epsom, Goodwood and Brighton. He wanted time to forget the room which he had left before he returned to it again, and there must be opportunity too to redecorate it in a few essentials. You know there was a brothel in Paris in the Rue de Provence between the last two wars. (Oh, I forgot. There have been many wars since, haven’t there, but they don’t seem to belong to us like those two do.) This brothel had rooms decorated in various styles – the far West, China, India, that kind of thing. Your uncle had much the same idea for his house.”
“But surely he never found one,” I exclaimed.
“In the end he was forced to compromise. I was afraid for a time that the best we could do would be twelve bedrooms – one room a month – but a short while afterwards, through one of my clients in Milan…”
“I thought you were working in Venice,” I interrupted with some suspicion.
“The business I was in,” my aunt said, “was peripatetic. We moved around – a fortnight’s season in Venice, the same in Milan, Florence and Rome, then back to Venice. It was known as la quindicina.”
“You were in a theatre company?” I asked.
“The description will serve[71]”, my aunt said with that recurring ambiguity of hers. “You must remember I was very young in those days.”
“Acting needs no excuse.”
“I