“I don’t – huc – think so.”
“We may discover it in time. You are your father’s son. That hiccup is best cured by drinking out of the opposite rim of a glass. You can imitate a glass with your hand. Liquid is not a necessary part of the cure.”
I drew a long free breath and asked, “Who was my mother, Aunt Augusta?” But she was already far away from that subject, speaking to the driver. “No, no, my man. This is the Crescent.”
“You said turn right, lady.”
“Then I apologize. It was my mistake. I am always a little uncertain about right and left. Port I can always remember because of the colour – red means left. You should have turned to port not starboard.”
“I’m no bloody navigator, lady.”
“Never mind. Just continue all the way round and start again. I take all the blame.[10]”
We drew up outside a public house. The driver said, “Ma’am, if you had only told me it was the Crown and Anchor…”
“Henry,” my aunt said, “if you could forget your hiccup for a moment.”
“Huc?” I asked.
“It’s six and six on the clock,” the driver said.
“Then we will let it reach seven shillings,” Aunt Augusta retorted. “Henry, I feel I ought perhaps to warn you before we go in that a white funeral in my case would have been quite out of place.”
“But-you’ve-never-married,” I said, very quickly to beat the hiccups.
“I have nearly always, during the last sixty or more years, had a friend,” Aunt Augusta said. She added, perhaps because I looked incredulous, “Age, Henry, may a little modify our emotions – it does not destroy them.”
Even those words did not prepare me properly for what I found next. My life in the bank had taught me, of course, to be unsurprised, even by the demand for startling overdrafts, and I had always made it a point[11] neither to ask for nor to listen to any explanation. The overdraft was given or refused simply on the previous credit of the client. If I seem to the reader a somewhat static character he should appreciate the long conditioning of my career before retirement. My aunt, I was to discover, had never been conditioned by anything at all, and she had no intention of explaining more than she had already done.
Chapter 3
The Crown and Anchor was built like a bank in Georgian style[12]. Through the windows I could see men with exaggerated moustaches in tweed coats, which were split horsily behind, gathered round a girl in jodhpurs. They were not the type to whom I would have extended much credit, and I doubted whether any of them, except the girl, had ever ridden a horse. They were all drinking bitter, and I had the impression that any spare cash they might have put aside went on tailors and hairdressers rather than equitation. A long experience with clients has made me prefer a shabby whisky-drinker to a well-dressed beer-drinker.
We went in by a side door. My aunt’s apartment was on the second floor, and on the first floor there was a small sofa, which I learnt later had been bought my aunt so that she could take a little rest on the way up. It was typical of her generous nature that she had bought a sofa, which could barely be squeezed onto the landing, and not a chair for one.
“I always take a little rest at this point. Come and sit down, too, Henry. The stairs are steep, though perhaps they don’t seem so at your age.” She looked at me critically. “You have certainly changed a lot since I saw you last, though you haven’t got much more hair.”
“I’ve had it, but I’ve lost it,” I explained.
“I have kept mine. I can still sit upon it,” She added surprisingly, “‘Rapunzel[13], Rapunzel, let down your hair’. Not that I could have ever let it down from a second-floor flat.”
“Aren’t you disturbed by the noise from the bar?”
“Oh no. And the bar is very convenient if I suddenly run short. I just send Wordsworth[14] down”.
“Who is Wordsworth?”
“I call him Wordsworth because I can’t bring myself to call him Zachary. All the eldest sons in his family have been called Zachary for generations – after Zachary Macaulay, who did so much for them on Clapham Common. The surname was adopted from the bishop not the poet.”
“He’s your valet?”
“Let us say he attends to my wants. A very gentle sweet strong person. But don’t let him ask you for a CTC. He receives quite enough from me.”
“What is a CTC?”
“That is what they called any tip or gift in Sierra Leone when he was a boy during the war. The initials belonged to Cape to Cairo cigarettes, which all the sailors handed out generously.”
My aunt’s conversation went too quickly for my understanding, so that I was not really prepared for the very large middle-aged Negro wearing a striped butcher’s apron who opened the door when my aunt rang.
“Why, Wordsworth,” she said with a touch of coquetry, “you’ve been washing up breakfast without waiting for me.” He stood there glaring at me, and I wondered whether he expected a CTC before he would let me pass.
“This is my nephew, Wordsworth,” my aunt said.
“You be telling me whole truth, woman?”
“Of course I am. Oh, Wordsworth, Wordsworth!” she added with tender banter.
He let us in. The lights were on in the living-room, now that the day had darkened, and my eyes were dazzled for a moment by rays from the glass ornaments which flashed back from every open space. There were angels on the buffet wearing robes striped like peppermint rock; and in an alcove there was a Madonna with a gold face and a gold halo and a blue robe. On a sideboard on a gold stand stood a navy-blue goblet, large enough to hold at least four bottles of wine, with a gold trellis curled around the bowl on which pink roses grew and green ivy. There were mauve storks on the bookshelves and red swans and blue fish. Black girls in scarlet dresses held green candle sconces, and shining down on all this was a chandelier which might have been made out of sugar icing hung with pale-blue, pink, and yellow blossoms.
“Venice once meant a lot to me[15]”, my aunt said rather unnecessarily.
I don’t pretend to be a judge of these things, but I thought the effect exaggerated and not in the best of taste.
“Such wonderful craftsmanship,” my aunt said. “Wordsworth, be a dear and fetch us two whiskies. Augusta feels a teeny bit sad after the sad sad ceremony.” She spoke to him as though he were a child – or a lover, but that relationship I was reluctant to accept.
“Everything go O.K.?” Wordsworth asked. “No bad medicine?”
“There was no contretemps[16]”, my aunt said. “Oh gracious, Henry, you haven’t forgotten your parcel?”
“No, no, I have it here.”
“I think perhaps Wordsworth had better put it in the refrigerator.”
“Quite unnecessary, Aunt Augusta. Ashes don’t deteriorate.”
“No, I suppose not. How silly of me. But let Wordsworth put it in the kitchen just the same. We don’t want to be reminded all the time of my poor sister. Now let me show you my room. I have more of my Venice treasures there.”
She had indeed. Her dressing-table gleamed with them: mirrors and powder-jars and ash-trays