Travels with my aunt / Путешествие с тетушкой. Книга для чтения на английском языке

“I have said that your official mother was a saint. The girl, you see, refused to marry your father, who was anxious – if you can use such an energetic term in his case – to do the right thing. So my sister covered up for her by marrying him. (He was not very strong-willed.) Afterwards, she padded herself for months with progressive cushions. No one ever suspected. She even wore the cushions in bed, and she was so deeply shocked when your father tried once to make love to her – after the marriage but before your birth – that, even when you had been safely delivered, she refused him what the Church calls his rights. He was never a man in any case to stand on them.”

I leant back hiccupping in the taxi. I couldn’t have spoken if I had tried. I remembered all those pursuits up the scaffolding. Had they been caused then by my mother’s jealousy or was it the apprehension that she might be required to pass again so many more months padded with cushions of assorted sizes?

“No,” my aunt said to the taxi-driver, “these are the Gardens. I told you – I am the Place.”

“Then I turn left, ma’am?”

“No. Right. On the left is the Crescent.”

“This shouldn’t come as a shock to you, Henry,” Aunt Augusta said. “My sister – your stepmother – perhaps we should agree to call her that – was a very noble person indeed.”

“And my – hic – father?”

“A bit of a hound, but so are most men. Perhaps it’s their best quality. I hope you have a little bit of the hound in you too, Henry.”

“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.