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    Travels with My Aunt
    Travels with My Aunt
    Travels with My Aunt
    Ebook336 pages6 hours

    Travels with My Aunt

    By Graham Greene

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    A retired London bank manager is yanked out of the suburbs by his eccentric aunt for a “cheerfully irreverent” romp across Europe (The Guardian).
     
    Now that the dullish Henry Pulling has left his job with an agreeable pension and a firm handshake, he plans to spend more time weeding his dahlias. Then, for the first time in fifty years, he sees his aunt Augusta at his mother’s funeral. Charging into her seventies with florid abandon, not a day of her life wasted, and her future as bright as her brilliant red hair, Augusta insists that Henry abandon his garden, follow her, and hold on tight.
     
    With that, she whisks her nephew out of Brighton and boards the Orient Express bound for Paris and Istanbul, then on to Paraguay, and down the rabbit hole of her past that swarms with swindlers, smugglers, war criminals, and rather unconventional lovers. With each new stop, Henry discovers not only more about his aunt and her secrets but also about himself as well.
     
    Pulsing with “the tragic and comic ironies of love, loyalty and belief” Graham Greene’s deceptive lark of novel was made into the 1972 film starring Maggie Smith (The Times, London).
     
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateApr 10, 2018
    ISBN9781504052559
    Travels with My Aunt
    Author

    Graham Greene

    Graham Greene (1904–1991) is recognized as one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, achieving both literary acclaim and popular success. His best known works include Brighton Rock, The Heart of the Matter, The Quiet American, and The Power and the Glory. After leaving Oxford, Greene first pursued a career in journalism before dedicating himself full-time to writing with his first big success, Stamboul Train. He became involved in screenwriting and wrote adaptations for the cinema as well as original screenplays, the most successful being The Third Man. Religious, moral, and political themes are at the root of much of his work, and throughout his life he traveled to some of the wildest and most volatile parts of the world, which provided settings for his fiction. Greene was a member of the Order of Merit and a Companion of Honour.  

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    Reviews for Travels with My Aunt

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    • 3/5
      Not my favorite Greene novel but rereading it after many years I was surprised to note that in this novel he begins to write like the Greene who wrote his later novels (Monsignor Quixote, The Bomb Party). Also, a priceless little episode while Pullen, the narrator is on a river boat toward the end of the book--only striking to a member of our family, however.
    • 1/5
      5 stars for giving me the best sleep ever!!!

      Seriously, I would read 3 pages and zzzzzzzzzzzzz. Since this book was part of a group read I was participating in I gave it my best effort but I only managed about 50 pages before I had to throw in the towel. I did like the first chapter. It was promising and I found myself chuckling at the chemistry between Aunt Augusta and Henry. After the first chapter it became boring and down right weird. Aunt Augusta's mood changes varied from paragraph to paragraph. I didn't find her as amusing as the first chapter and by the third chapter I wanted to stab her in the face. Henry was so freaking boring and his following Aunt Augusta about was seriously out of character for him. His personality was just bland. Wordsworth (Aunt Augusta's lover/drug supplier) was another character that needed a good facestabbing for sheer annoyingness. Then came the weird 1960's drug references. I won't even get into that. That was the point where I just had to stop. I couldn't take one more of Augusta's mood swings or weird reminiscent past stories or Henry's bland assessment of the whole situation. So in short, this is one that I don't plan on picking up every again and it has seriously turned me off of Greene's writing.
    • 5/5
      Delightful
    • 4/5
      I've just reread this book for the first time in probably 40 years and had forgotten how truly funny it is and what a change from most of the other things that Graham Greene wrote. Here there is no Catholic guilt, nor is there the nasty overtones (or undertones as the case may be) of the cold war. Instead we have a paen to silliness and a send-up of the typical characters who appear in Greene's more serious works - Most notably James O'Toole of the CIA.Henry Pulling is a mild mannered retired bank manager living in the London suburbs peaceably tending his dahlias when his Aunt Augusta, whom he hasn't seen since he was a very small boy, appears at his mother's funeral and quickly takes over his life. She whisks him away from the service (along with the urn of his mother's ashes) to her rather dubious apartment located over a pub with an even more dubious Jamaican "man servant" who she has dubbed Wordsworth The latter, a dealer in pot and under suspicion from the local police, mixes his contraband in with Henry's mother's ashes leading to what will be come the first of many unfortunate encounters Henry has with law enforcement.Aunt Augusta's life has been everything that Henry's has not. She has been a circus performer, a kept woman in Paris, a prostitute and a lover of many, many men, the most important of which is the shadowy Snr. Visconti who is reputed to be both an art thief and a collaborator with the Nazis. None of these people sound sympathetic in the abstract, but in the skilled hands of Graham Greene they all become amazingly likeable. Is it any surprise then, that Henry also finds himself drawn to this life of adventure?The novel covers many topical events of the 1960's, so brushing up on events in Paraguay, Argentina, and Turkey during that period will greatly add to the enjoyment of this book. The novel was made into a movie in the early 1970's with Maggie Smith (who else?) in the role of Aunt Augusta, However, Hollywood made its usual hash of the story, so don't think you can watch the movie and not read the book. And besides, the book is just so much fun.
    • 3/5
      Early late-period Greene and, as late-period Greene goes, not my favourite at that. Buoyed in parts by amusing set-pieces and witty dialogue, and dragged down in others by scenes and characters that are embarrassingly dated products of a bygone time and place. At its best its Greene at his funniest. At its worst its just downright offensive.
    • 4/5
      Totally different from the other Greene novels I've read - hilarious and surprising.
    • 5/5
      so funny...the aunt and the nephew are great characters.
    • 5/5
      I love the humor in this book. The fact that the aunt is so brutally honest and yet retains a compassionate nature puts her up there with Maude (from the 1971 movie _Harold and Maude_). A character she greatly resembles in terms of spirit I might add.
    • 3/5
      An enjoyable read. I like Greene but this isn't his best. The writing's good but the "secret" is a little obvious. The ending is disappointing, too, probably because it's dated. I had hoped our hero would be just that, but...
    • 4/5
      Locations: England, Paris, Turkey, Argentina
      A retired bank manager becomes acquainted with his aunt, a well-traveled woman in her 70's with a complicated, lover-strewn past and a bohemian attitude towards life.
    • 4/5
      Henry Pulling, is a retired bank manager who is leading what may be the most boring life ever when he meets his Aunt Augusta at his mother's funeral. Although Augusta is in her seventies, she is far livelier than Henry and soon he is traveling the world in her wake. This book is fun, funny and full of surprises.
    • 4/5
      Bank clerk Henry Pullen has lived a very quiet life- but then meets his exotic aunt...
    • 4/5
      This book delights and entertains as one may reasonably expect from Graham Greene. He spins a tale of a stodgey, middle-aged man who meets his Aunt Augusta at his mother's cremation at which event she informs him that she was once present at a Premature Cremation. Horrified and fascinated, he must know more. Eventually they travel throughout Europe and Africa and he gradually comes to believe that there may be much much more to his aunt than he originally thought. The movie, while fun, did not do justice to this book.
    • 5/5
      Classic Greene. One of the funniest books I ever read.
    • 5/5
      i am deeply. madly. crazily in love with graham greene after finishing this book.

      more later.
    • 4/5
      This book was perfect as the shortest day of the year approached. It is lighthearted, funny and quirky. Henry Pulling's life veers in a wildly new direction when he meets Aunt Augusta at his mother's funeral. At first I thought it was going to be a compilation of their exploits but it turned out to have a more serious undercurrent. This book is another example of how to show without telling. Henry comes to realize, as does the reader, that is is our connections with others that give life to life. Much of the book is dated but it is charming nonetheless.
    • 3/5
      Henry Pulling is just a little bit dull. He has taken early retirement from the bank, where he was manager, he has never married, and leads a quiet and uninteresting life pottering in the garden and tending his dahlias. At his mother’s funeral he meets her sister, Augusta, again for the first time in 50 years, and she tells him that the lady he considered to be his mother was actually not. He travels back to her home and meets Wordsworth, a man from Sierra Leone and who is his Aunt’s confident and lover, after several drink he returns home. Soon after the police come round asking to see what is in the urn, he explains it is his mothers ashes, but they take it from him for sampling.

      His aunt persuades him to join her on a trip to Brighton, as she feels that he needs to travel more, something that a psychic predicts will happen as well. Turns out that the urn with his mothers ashes had drugs added, probably by Wordsworth, who has now disappeared. Henry decides to join his aunt on a trip to Paris, and then onto Istanbul on the Orient Express. The journey is relatively uneventful, but Henry does meet a young lady called Tolley who he develops a friendship with. Very soon after they arrive in Istanbul, they are both approached by the police and questioned. Henery is starting to learn that he Aunt is not always the conventional type, and seems to have had many dodgy dealings and associations. They are soon deported back to the UK.

      Back in the UK, Henry returns to his dahlias, but it now doesn’t have the same appeal. The police are asking more question about his aunt too, and one of her former associates, but she has vanished of the face of the earth. Until one day he receives a letter asking him to come to South America, so he sets off to join her once again.

      It was quite an enjoyable read. Green has managed to blend a mystery story with travel, a dash of thriller with a healthy dollop of classic British farce. The characters are not particularly deep, but you do see Henry develop from the staid, and serious bank manager to a free spirited man. It was very readable too; Green has a way of pacing the story so you don’t get bored. It was a touch predictable, but entertaining nonetheless.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed this one; it didn’t turn out to be what I was expecting. It’s my first Graham Greene, so I didn’t really know much about his style, but I should probably have guessed that the characters would be more complex than they appear on the surface.

      “I was sunk deep in my middle age..... ‘I have been happy,’ I said, ‘but I have been so bored for so long.’”

      Lost a point for the ending, though. Too Lolita-ish.
    • 4/5
      A little bit travelogue, a little bit humorous, a little bit mystery, a little bit philosophical, and a whole lot entertaining.
    • 4/5
      What a wonderful tale. Combining the staid world of the retired bank manager with the glamourous, fantasy world of his aunt turned mother. Wistfulness, loneliness and longing matched against duty, routine and social standards of the middle classes. Snatches of the grey, relentless boredom of Britain in the 1950s show why the social revolution of the 60s came about. Our hero ends with his own revolution.
    • 3/5
      Graham Greene tended to separate his books into "entertainments" (lighter, more disposable works) and his serious fiction. While he considered this one of the former, it's still sharp and biting, and has a very clear satirical eye. I found the first half difficult to slog through and the second half immensely readable. The ending left me feeling deflated, and this is coming from someone who generally likes it when a story's plotlines DON'T resolve.
    • 5/5
      Who in the world could use a big shake more than the stodgy Henry Pulling? Henry never married and spent his life locked up behind the safe and tedious walls of a bank. Then, at his mother’s funeral, Henry met his Aunt Augusta and he was sent spinning out into a world he never knew existed.Graham Greene is that Graham Greene, he of The Power and the Glory and Our Man in Havana and The Quiet American. So Travels With My Aunt is a totally different Graham Greene. Every chapter had me. I now have a new gloriously inspiring role model for my last years.
    • 3/5
      Gentle laughs on nearly every page.
      Published in 1969 so that the British manners, of which fun is poked, are dated, but still recognisable as those of my parents.
    • 4/5
      I'd be pretty easy, not to mention tempting, to classify "Travels With My Aunt" as a novel about the comic collision of British middle-class conformity (Henry Pulling) and British eccentricity (Aunt Augusta). It's also one of those novels drawn from that period in late sixties or early seventies in which people who'd been heretofore immersed in utterly unadventurous British culture were forced to reckon with new, strange cultural youth movements (Tooley). The passage of time seems to weigh heavily on Greene in this one: not only is much of the book about Henry Pulling's evolving relationship with his long-dead father, but the Europe he seems around him also seems to be transforming in unpredictable ways. The Orient Express is a ghost of its past self, while the Europe he sees from his train window is full of both bucolic scenes and new radio towers and apartment blocks. Currency restrictions still seem to be in place, though.

      You could call it one of Greene's "entertainments," except that a fair amount of evil lurks around the novel's edges. It's not just that Aunt Augusta has a colorfully shady past, it's that her whims might have taken her into the orbit of some historically unpleasant people. Meanwhile Henry gets involved in businesses he wouldn't have touched as a bank manager in a comfortable London neighborhood, and his former potential paramour slowly gets used to a new way of looking at racial relations after she moves to South Africa. There's a part of me that thinks that "Travels With My Aunt" has something to say about how easy it is to slide into moral hazard when one escapes the cultural confines of a comfortable, well-regulated British existence. By the novel's end, Aunt Augusta is nicely settled and Henry has settled into a sort of peaceful retirement that he never expected. This book may not be as light as it seems, but I think it represents a pleasant blend of Greene's lighter and heavier themes.
    • 3/5
      Travels With My Aunt by Graham Greene is a comedic adventure story of Henry Pulling, a man leading a settled life who first meets his mother's sister, Augusta, at his mother's funeral. Too polite to refuse her request to travel with her, he joins his aunt on the first of a series of journeys. At first Henry is shocked at his aunt's illegal financial dealings and romantic affairs, but after he returns to his life he quickly comes to the realization that that his settled life is actually quite mundane. He concludes that he has a taste for adventure after all and away he goes to track down his aunt and lead a life he never would have imagined he would live.

      Aunt Augusta's unpredictable character is juxtaposed with Henry's very buttoned up British personality. Along the way they encounter many quirky and off-beat characters that enhance the zany quality of this novel.

      This is not a multi-layered novel full of literary tricks and turns, and the main theme is a pretty straight forward "live life to the fullest" standard message, but Greene's comedic delivery had me smiling.

      I am not lover of British humor, so my three star rating lies more in my own personal taste rather than Greene's execution of the novel, but if you enjoy British humor, you would probably love this book. I would categorize it as a good summer read.
    • 3/5
      Life takes a new direction for retired banker Henry Pulling after his mother's funeral. At the funeral he met his mother's sister, his Aunt Augusta, for the first time in his memory. Aunt Augusta proves to be as uninhibited as her sister had been straight-laced. Despite his reservations about her conversation and behavior, a conservative Henry loosens up enough to accompany Aunt Augusta on a day trip to Brighton. This is just the beginning of Henry's adventures with Aunt Augusta. As Henry learns more about his Aunt Augusta, he also discovers more about himself and about what he wants out of life.

      I find it difficult to see this as much more than a period piece. It was published on the heels of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and it seems to channel the spirit of that movement into the lifestyle of an elderly woman and her middle-aged nephew. In a sense, it's a coming-of-age novel with a middle aged protagonist. I didn't love it, but I didn't hate it either.
    • 4/5
      At the funeral of his mother, his aunt Augusta, aged 75, appears in the life of the stodgy nerd and retired banker Henry Pulling. From the earliest moments of their involvement, Henry's life changes from quiet and boring to a roller-coaster of adventure, in which no cliche of slap-stick is left unused. Aunt Augusta develops as a kind of diametric personality to James Bond. She is adventurous, eccentric, practical and pragmatic, and very, very unconventional. Up to a high age, she has been having a sexual relationship with an African servant, Wordsworth, who is completely devoted to her. She cannot see any wickedness in Wordsworth's smoking of marijuana. Aunt Augusta herself regularly engages in illicit trade, smuggling currency, gold and art to finance her trips and secure financial independence. She is under constant vigilance by the police, but is clever at eluding them, and leading her extravagant, international lifestyle.

      Aunt Augusta's interest in Henry is far from coincidental, as suggested at the beginning of the book. Her influence shows, as Henry is persuaded to marry a 14-year-old girl, tat the end of the novel, as he settles with Aunt Augusta and her life-long criminal lover, Mr Visconti in Paraguay.

      Travels with my aunt is an unexpectedly funny novel by Graham Greene.
    • 5/5
      I found this book in a used book store in Toronto. I was with a coworker and she had asked if I had ever read anything by Graham Greene. I had not and this was my introduction. I would probably say this was one of the best books I had read. It was laugh out loud funny in parts.
    • 3/5
      Henry Pulling is a retired bank manager. At his mother's funeral, he encounters his long lost aunt, Augusta. She manages to talk him into leaving suburbia and his dahlias behind to travel with her to Brighton, Istanbul, Boulogne and Paraguay. Along the way, he encounters lots of unusual people, and unusual circumstances.

      This is a nice enough read, but I did find it all a bit silly. I didn't much like aunt Augusta's voice, which irritated me at times, and there were quite a few ridiculously coincidental meetings during the travels too.

      This is not a book I would rave about, but pleasant enough if you like that sort of thing.
    • 4/5
      tThis book published in 1970, is a far lighter book than Greene's great novels of his earlier career: The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, and The
      End of the Affair, but it is light-hearted and often funny as it tells of Henry Pulling, a retired English bank officer whose main interes t has been in dahlias. He meets his aunt, whom he has not seen in 50 years, at his (purported) mother's funeral and is drawn into traveling with her and coming to know her unconventional and exciting life, even though she is 75. The book is very well-written and is often funny and holds one's interest well, even though it at least to me, did not appear to be a serious work

    Book preview

    Travels with My Aunt - Graham Greene

    PART 1

    1

    I met my Aunt Augusta for the first time in more than half a century at my mother’s funeral. My mother was approaching eighty-six when she died, and my aunt was some eleven or twelve years younger. I had retired from the bank two years before with an adequate pension and a silver handshake. There had been a takeover by the Westminster and my branch was considered redundant. Everyone thought me lucky, but I found it difficult to occupy my time. I have never married, I have always lived quietly, and, apart from my interest in dahlias, I have no hobby. For those reasons I found myself agreeably excited by my mother’s funeral.

    My father had been dead for more than forty years. He was a building contractor of a lethargic disposition who used to take afternoon naps in all sorts of curious places. This irritated my mother, who was an energetic woman, and she used to seek him out to disturb him. As a child I remember going to the bathroom—we lived in Highgate then—and finding my father asleep in the bath in his clothes. I am rather short-sighted and I thought that my mother had been cleaning an overcoat, until I heard my father whisper, ‘Bolt the door on the inside when you go out.’ He was too lazy to get out of the bath and too sleepy, I suppose, to realize that his order was quite impossible to carry out. At another time, when he was responsible for a new block of flats in Lewisham, he would take his catnap in the cabin of the giant crane, and construction would be halted until he woke. My mother, who had a good head for heights, would climb ladders to the highest scaffolding in the hope of discovering him, when as like as not he would have found a corner in what was to be the underground garage. I had always thought of them as reasonably happy together: their twin roles of the hunter and the hunted probably suited them, for my mother by the time I first remembered her had developed an alert poise of the head and a wary trotting pace which reminded me of a gun-dog. I must be forgiven these memories of the past: at a funeral they are apt to come unbidden, there is so much waiting about.

    Not many people attended the service, which took place at a famous crematorium, but there was that slight stirring of excited expectation which is never experienced at a graveside. Will the oven doors open? Will the coffin stick on the way to the flames? I heard a voice behind me saying in very clear cold accents, ‘I was present once at a premature cremation.’

    It was, as I recognized with some difficulty from a photograph in the family album, my Aunt Augusta, who had arrived late, dressed rather as the late Queen Mary of beloved memory might have dressed if she had still been with us and had adapted herself a little bit towards the present mode. I was surprised by her brilliant red hair, monumentally piled, and her two big front teeth which gave her a vital Neanderthal air. Somebody said, ‘Hush,’ and a clergyman began a prayer which I believe he must have composed himself. I had never heard it at any other funeral service, and I have attended a great number in my time. A bank manager is expected to pay his last respects to every old client who is not as we say ‘in the red’, and in any case I have a weakness for funerals. People are generally seen at their best on these occasions, serious and sober, and optimistic on the subject of personal immortality.

    The funeral of my mother went without a hitch. The flowers were removed economically from the coffin, which at the touch of a button slid away from us out of sight. Afterwards in the troubled sunlight I shook hands with a number of nephews and nieces and cousins whom I hadn’t seen for years and could not identify. It was understood that I had to wait for the ashes and wait I did, while the chimney of the crematorium gently smoked overhead.

    ‘You must be Henry,’ Aunt Augusta said, gazing reflectively at me with her sea-deep blue eyes.

    ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and you must be Aunt Augusta.’

    ‘It’s a very long time since I saw anything of your mother,’ Aunt Augusta told me. ‘I hope that her death was an easy one.’

    ‘Oh yes, you know, at her time of life—her heart just stopped. She died of old age.’

    ‘Old age? She was only twelve years older than I am,’ Aunt Augusta said accusingly.

    We took a little walk together in the garden of the crematorium. A crematorium garden resembles a real garden about as much as a golf links resembles a genuine landscape. The lawns are too well cultivated and the trees too stiffly on parade: the urns resemble the little boxes containing sand where one tees up. ‘Tell me,’ Aunt Augusta said, ‘are you still at the bank?’

    ‘No, I retired two years ago.’

    ‘Retired? A young man like you! For heaven’s sake, what do you do with your time?’

    ‘I cultivate dahlias, Aunt Augusta.’ She gave a regal right-about swing of a phantom bustle.

    ‘Dahlias! Whatever would your father have said!’

    ‘He took no interest in flowers, I know that. He always thought a garden was a waste of good building space. He would calculate how many bedrooms one above the other he could have fitted in. He was a very sleepy man.’

    ‘He needed bedrooms for more than sleep,’ my aunt said with a coarseness which surprised me.

    ‘He slept in the oddest places. I remember once in the bathroom …’

    ‘In a bedroom he did other things than sleep,’ she said. ‘You are the proof.’

    I began to understand why my parents had seen so little of Aunt Augusta. She had a temperament my mother would not have liked. My mother was far from being a puritan, but she wanted everything to be done or said at a suitable time. At meals we would talk about meals. Perhaps the price of food. If we went to the theatre we talked in the interval about the play—or other plays. At breakfast we spoke of the news. She was adept at guiding conversation back into the right channel if it strayed. She had a phrase, ‘My dear, this isn’t the moment …’ Perhaps in the bedroom, I found myself thinking, with something of Aunt Augusta’s directness, she talked about love. That was why she couldn’t bear my father sleeping in odd places, and, when I developed an interest in dahlias, she often warned me to forget about them during banking hours.

    By the time we had finished our walk the ashes were ready for me. I had chosen a very classical urn in black steel, and I would have liked to assure myself that there had been no error, but they presented me with a package very neatly done up in brown paper with red paper seals which reminded me of a Christmas gift. ‘What are you going to do with it?’ Aunt Augusta said.

    ‘I thought of making a little throne for it among my dahlias.’

    ‘It will look a little bleak in winter.’

    ‘I hadn’t considered that. I could always bring it indoors at that season.’

    ‘Backwards and forwards. My sister seems hardly likely to rest in peace.’

    ‘I’ll think over it again.’

    ‘You are not married, are you?’

    ‘No.’

    ‘Any children?’

    ‘Of course not.’

    ‘There is always the question to whom you will bequeath my sister. I am likely to predecease you.’

    ‘One cannot think of everything at once.’

    ‘You could have left it here,’ Aunt Augusta said.

    ‘I thought it would look well among the dahlias,’ I replied obstinately, for I had spent all the previous evening designing a simple plinth in good taste.

    ‘À chacun son goût,’ my aunt said with a surprisingly good French accent. I had never considered our family very cosmopolitan.

    ‘Well, Aunt Augusta,’ I said at the gates of the crematorium (I was preparing to leave, for my garden called), ‘it’s been many years since we saw each other … I hope …’ I had left the lawn-mower outside, uncovered, and there was a hint of rain in the quick grey clouds overhead. ‘I would like it very much if one day you would take a cup of tea with me in Southwood.’

    ‘At the moment I would prefer something stronger and more tranquillizing. It is not every day one sees a sister consigned to the flames. Like the Pucelle.’

    ‘I don’t quite …’

    ‘Joan of Arc.’

    ‘I have some sherry at home, but it’s rather a long ride and perhaps …’

    ‘My apartment is at any rate north of the river,’ Aunt Augusta said firmly, ‘and I have everything we require.’ Without asking my assent she hailed a taxi. It was the first and perhaps, when I think back on it now, the most memorable of the journeys we were to take together.

    2

    I was quite right in my weather forecast. The grey clouds began to rain and I found myself preoccupied with my private worries. All along the shiny streets people were putting up umbrellas and taking shelter in the doorways of Burton’s, the United Dairies, Mac Fisheries or the

    ABC

    . For some reason rain in the suburbs reminds me of a Sunday.

    ‘What’s on your mind?’ Aunt Augusta said.

    It was so stupid of me. I left my lawn-mower out, on the lawn, uncovered.’

    My aunt showed me no sympathy. She said, ‘Forget your lawn-mower. It’s odd how we seem to meet only at religious ceremonies. The last time I saw you was at your baptism. I was not asked but I came.’ She gave a croak of a laugh. ‘Like the wicked fairy.’

    ‘Why didn’t they ask you?’

    ‘I knew too much. About both of them. I remember you were far too quiet. You didn’t yell the devil out. I wonder if he is still there?’ She called to the driver, ‘Don’t confuse the Place with the Square, the Crescent or the Gardens. I am the Place.’

    ‘I didn’t know there was any breach. Your photograph was there in the family album.’

    ‘For appearances only.’ She gave a little sigh which drove out a puff of scented powder. ‘Your mother was a very saintly woman. She should by rights have had a white funeral. La Pucelle,’ she added again.

    ‘I don’t quite see … La Pucelle means—well, to put it bluntly, I am here, Aunt Augusta.’

    ‘Yes. But you were your father’s child. Not your mother’s.’

    That morning I had been very excited, even exhilarated, by the thought of the funeral. Indeed, if it had not been my mother’s, I would have found it a wholly desirable break in the daily routine of retirement, and I was pleasurably reminded of the old banking days, when I had paid the final adieu to so many admirable clients. But I had never contemplated such a break as this one which my aunt announced so casually. Hiccups are said to be cured by a sudden shock and they can equally be caused by one. I hiccupped an incoherent question.

    ‘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 safety 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—hie—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—hue—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.’

    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.’

    ‘Hue?’ 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 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.

    3

    The Crown and Anchor was built like a bank in Georgian style. 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 by 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 on to 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, 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 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,’ 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

    OK

    ?’Wordsworth asked. ‘No bad medicine?’

    ‘There was no contretemps,’ 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 and bowls for safety pins. ‘They brighten the darkest day,’ she said. There was a very large doublebed as curlicued as the glass. ‘I am especially attached to Venice,’ she explained, ‘because I began my real career there, and my travels. I have always been very fond of travel. It’s a great grief to me that my travels now are curtailed.’

    ‘Age strikes us all before we know it,’ I said.

    ‘Age? I was not referring to age. I hope I don’t look all that decrepit, Henry, but I like having a companion and Wordsworth is very occupied now because he’s studying to enter the London School of Economics. This is Wordsworth’s snuggery,’ and she opened the door of an adjoining room. It was crowded with glass Disney figures and worse—all the grinning mice and cats and hares from inferior American cartoon films, blown with as much care as the chandelier.

    ‘From Venice too,’ my aunt said, ‘clever but not so pretty. I thought them suitable, however, for a man’s room.’

    ‘Does he like them?’

    ‘He spends very little time there,’ my aunt said, ‘what with his studies and everything else…’

    ‘I wouldn’t like to wake up to them,’ I said.

    ‘He seldom does.’

    My aunt led me back to the sitting-room where Wordsworth had laid out three more Venetian glasses with gold rims and a jug of water with colours mingled like marble. The bottle of Black Label looked normal and out of place, rather like the only man in a dinner-jacket at a fancy-dress party, a comparison which came at once to my mind because I have found myself several times in that uncomfortable situation, since I have a rooted objection to dressing up.

    Wordsworth said, ‘The telephone talk all the bloody time while you not here. Ar tell them you don gone to a very smart funeral.’

    ‘It’s so convenient when one can tell the truth,’ my aunt said. ‘Was there no message?’

    ‘Oh, poor old Wordsworth not understand one bloody word. Ar say to them you no talk English. They go away double quick.’ My aunt poured out larger portions of whisky than I am accustomed to.

    ‘A little more water please, Aunt Augusta.’

    ‘I can say now to both of you how relieved I am that everything went without a hitch. I once attended a very important funeral—the wife of a famous man of letters who had not been the most faithful of husbands. It was soon after the first great war had ended, I was living in Brighton, and I was very interested at that time in the Fabians. I had learnt about them from your father when I was a girl. I arrived early as a spectator and I was leaning over the Communion rail—if you can call it that in a crematorium chapel—trying to make out the names on the wreaths. I was the first there, all alone with the flowers and the coffin. Wordsworth must forgive me for telling this story at such length—he has heard it before. Let me refresh your glass.’

    ‘No, no, Aunt Augusta. I have more than enough.’

    ‘Well, I suppose I was fumbling about a little too much and I must have accidentally touched a button. The coffin began to slide away, the doors opened, I could feel the hot air of the oven and hear the flap of the flames, the coffin went in and the doors closed, and at that very moment in walked the whole grand party, Mr and Mrs Bernard Shaw, Mr H. G. Wells, Miss E. Nesbit (to use her maiden name), Doctor Havelock Ellis, Mr Ramsay MacDonald, and the widower, while the clergyman (non-denominational of course) came through a door on the other side of the rail. Somebody began to play a humanist hymn by Edward Carpenter, Cosmos, O Cosmos, Cosmos shall we call Thee? But there was no coffin.’

    ‘Whatever did you do, Aunt Augusta?’

    ‘I buried my face in my handkerchief and simulated grief, but you know I don’t think anyone (except, I suppose, the clergyman and he kept dumb about it) noticed that the coffin wasn’t there. The widower certainly didn’t, but then he hadn’t noticed his wife for some years. Doctor Havelock Ellis made a very moving address (or so it seemed to me then: I hadn’t finally plumped for Catholicism, though I was on the brink) about the dignity of a funeral service conducted without illusions or rhetoric. He could truthfully have said without a corpse too. Everybody was quite satisfied. You can understand why I was very careful this morning not to fumble.’

    I looked at my aunt surreptitiously over the whisky. I didn’t know what to say. ‘How sad’ seemed inappropriate. I wondered whether the funeral had ever really taken place, though in the months that followed I was to realize that my aunt’s stories were always basically true—only minor details might sometimes be added to compose a picture. Wordsworth found the right words for me. He said, ‘We must allays go careful careful at a funeral.’ He added, ‘In Mendeland—ma first wife she was Mende—they go open deceased person’s back an they go take out the spleen. If spleen be too big, then deceased person was a witch an everyone mock the whole family and lef the funeral double quick. That happen to ma wife’s pa. He dead of malaria, but these ignorant people they don know malaria make the spleen big. So ma wife and her ma they go right away from Mendeland and come to Freetown. They don wan to be mocked by the neighbours.’

    ‘There must be a great many witches in Mendeland,’ my aunt said.

    ‘Ya’as, sure thing there are. Plenty too many.’

    I said, ‘I really think I must be going now, Aunt Augusta. I can’t keep my mind off the mowing-machine. It will be quite rusted in this

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