A Conspiracy of Aunts Read online

  ‘You what?’

  ‘She will look after the child while we are away,’ Aunt Catherine said. She walked over to the door, then turned to face her sisters again. ‘And as you carry out your missions, examine your consciences with regard to the boy,’ she told them. ‘My account with the Bank of Heaven is in healthy credit, but the rest of you could use a few good works to help pay off your spiritual overdrafts.’

  4

  Life, I’ve often thought, is very much like a game of bridge …

  Oh God, that sounds awful, doesn’t it? It’s the sort of line a satirist might use in a sketch about a vicar.

  ‘You know,’ – plummy voice, elongated face – ‘as I was on my way to church this morning, it struck me forcibly that when we play the game of bridge we are, in a very real sense, playing the game of life.’

  But life is like bridge in so many ways. For a start, the cards you receive are pre-dealt, and there’s no way you can alter that. But what you do with your hand is up to you. If you are to be successful in the game of life, you must first sort out your cards until you can see a pattern. Having done that, you must decide which cards within the pattern will be important, and which are merely peripheral. It is this decision, this ordering of priorities, which will determine your play.

  A word of warning: a good player will inevitably make more of his hand than a poor one with the same cards, but however brilliant he is, he can never go beyond the hand. I was dealt a quartet of aunts, but the eventual outcome was far from determined at that point. Had Fate shuffled a little less, or cut at some other point in the pack, the play would be entirely different. Or to put it another way, if – when Aunt Catherine had divided up the errands – it hadn’t fallen to Aunt Jacqueline to look after me for an hour, I might indeed have ended up as one of Dr Barnardo’s little sunbeams.

  But Aunt Jacqueline was deputed to look after me, and when the other aunts had left – Sadie gliding across the carpet, Peggy wobbling through the door – she and I found ourselves alone together.

  I have always had a quick, active mind, and as I sat under the standard lamp, watching my aunt steadily smoke her way through a Virginia sharecropper’s annual quota, I began to feel boredom setting in. I had the solution to my ennui in my pocket – a small pack of cards – but I had not dared to take them out while Aunt Catherine was in the room.

  Now, however, I plucked up my courage and said, ‘Can I play cards, Auntie Jacqueline?’

  My aunt snorted. ‘Don’t want to play cards,’ she said. ‘Not with a kid.’

  ‘I don’t need you,’ I pointed out. ‘I can play by myself.’

  ‘By yourself?’ Aunt Jacqueline scoffed. ‘How? Fool yourself at Happy Families? Surprise yourself at Snap?’

  Happy Families! Snap! The idea of playing either of those childish games would never have occurred to me.

  ‘I was going to play Patience,’ I said, very much on my dignity.

  ‘Patience,’ my aunt said, the surprise evident in her voice. ‘How old are you, child?’

  ‘Nine.’

  Aunt Jacqueline’s eyes narrowed. ‘All right,’ she conceded, ‘you may play Patience.’

  As I dealt the cards, I felt her gaze on me, but apart from the occasional sucking sound as she drew on her cigarette, she kept perfectly silent.

  The game I’d chosen to play had a one-in-three chance of working out. It was fairly standard – black on red, red on black – except that the appearance of a jack necessitated a change in the order – black on black, red on red – until another jack came up and reversed the process. I became so absorbed in the game that I did not notice Aunt Jacqueline rise from her seat, cross the room and kneel down next to me. In fact, it was not until I had played the final card – a seven of clubs – that I even became aware of the cloud of smoke which was encircling my head.

  ‘It looks like an interesting game,’ my Aunt Jacqueline said. ‘Tell me the rules.’

  I explained them. Aunt Jacqueline took the cards from me, shuffled them with her deft, sure, nicotine-stained fingers, and dealt a new hand. It took her five minutes to play it out, and when she’d finished, she nodded her head several times, as if confirming an earlier suspicion.

  ‘It is a good game,’ she said. ‘Who taught it to you?’

  ‘Nobody, auntie.’

  Aunt Jacqueline snorted again. ‘Somebody must have taught it to you. Didn’t make it up yourself, did you?’

  ‘Yes, auntie.’

  ‘Did you? Did you really?’ Aunt Jacqueline nodded her head reflectively. ‘How long have you been playing cards?’

  How long?

  Forever!

  Playing cards, like reading, seemed to be something I’d always done.

  ‘Well?’ Aunt Jacqueline demanded. ‘How long?’

  ‘Since I was three?’ I hazarded.

  ‘Don’t know how to play Bridge, do you?’

  ‘No,’ I agreed, humiliated.

  ‘Of course you don’t,’ Aunt Jacqueline said airily. ‘You’re far too young to understand.’

  My feeling of humiliation was rapidly replaced by one of injured pride.

  ‘Teach me,’ I said.

  ‘No point,’ Aunt Jacqueline replied. ‘It’s well beyond your comprehension, child.’

  ‘Teach me,’ I insisted.

  My aunt glanced at her watch, and shrugged.

  ‘I suppose I might as well try,’ she said. ‘After all, it will be another half hour before Catherine the Great comes back.’ She shuffled the cards. ‘Now the first thing to remember is the order the suits come in. Clubs is the lowest, then diamonds, then hearts, and spades is the most valuable suit of all. Think you can remember that?’

  ‘Clubs, diamonds, hearts, then spades,’ I repeated. ‘Oh yes, I’ll remember that, all right.’

  5

  By the time Aunt Catherine returned from the undertaker’s, we were half-way through our fourth game of Honeymoon Bridge.

  The senior of my aunts was not at all pleased with the way things had developed.

  ‘Cards are the Devil’s handiwork,’ she stormed from the doorway. ‘As surely as Fairy goes further than any ordinary washing-up liquid – as surely as that – you are gambling with your salvation by leading this child astray.’

  ‘I’ll take him,’ Aunt Jacqueline said, not looking up from her game.

  ‘You’ll what?’

  ‘I’ll take him. The boy. Richard.’

  ‘His name is Robert.

  ‘Robert, then. I’ll take him.’

  ‘I would not let you have him now,’ the senior aunt said. ‘Not after I’ve seen, with my own eyes, the tub of evil in which you seek to immerse him.’

  ‘All right – you take him,’ Aunt Jacqueline said, trumping both my return diamond and her sister’s objection.

  From the corner of my eye, I could see that Aunt Catherine was torn between duty and expediency.

  ‘If I were to allow it,’ she said, expediency having won an easy victory, ‘you would have to promise – here and now – that you would never again play cards with the child.’

  ‘Agreed,’ Aunt Jacqueline said, cashing in her ace of clubs.

  PART TWO: The Queen of Clubs

  1

  Holding a large suitcase in my small hand, I stepped awkwardly off the train and onto the platform of Lewes station. My aunt, her feet already firmly on the ground, looked around her.

  ‘Where the hell is Tom?’ she demanded belligerently.

  ‘Tom?’ I repeated. ‘Is he my uncle?’

  ‘No, he is not,’ my aunt said curtly. ‘Your uncle’s name was Charles, but he’s long gone. And bloody good riddance. The man couldn’t bid a grand slam to save his life.’ She scanned the station once more. ‘There he is. Late as usual.’

  The object of her criticism, it appeared, was the man in a pale fawn overcoat who was making his way towards us. He was middle-aged, of average height, and had neutral brown hair
and a wispy moustache which was only remarkable for its complete lack of remarkableness.

  ‘How did it go?’ Tom asked when my aunt, a cigarette stuck firmly in her mouth, had turned her head slightly so he could kiss her on the cheek.

  ‘How did it go?’ Aunt Jacqueline repeated. ‘It was my sister’s funeral. We buried her. That’s what people do at funerals.’

  If Tom noticed the sarcasm, he didn’t show it. Instead, he merely nodded his head. It was his eyes I noticed now I could see him from close up. They weren’t exceptionable in themselves – pale brown and revealing no particular depth of intelligence, they fitted in perfectly with the rest of his face – but what was exceptional was the look in them.

  They burned!

  With love!

  I looked beyond Aunt Jacqueline to see for myself at whom he was gazing. The train had pulled out. The disembarked passengers had all gone. We were the only three people left on the platform.

  I turned back to my aunt. Could she – this stringy woman in a severe suit, this aunt I had at first mistaken for an uncle, this smoking machine on knobbly knees – could she, I say again, be the object of Tom’s adoration?

  There was no one else there. Incredible as it might seem, it simply had to be her.

  ‘Who’s this?’ Tom asked, noticing me for the first time.

  ‘He’s my nephew,’ Aunt Jacqueline said. ‘His name’s … err …’

  ‘Bobby,’ I supplied.

  ‘I didn’t know you even had a nephew,’ Tom said.

  ‘Well, I do. And he’s coming to live with me.’

  Tom frowned.

  ‘Any objections?’ Aunt Jacqueline demanded.

  ‘No, no,’ Tom said hastily. ‘It’s just that I never thought that you … somehow you just didn’t seem the type to …’

  The type to do what, Tom?

  To take in a poor, helpless orphan?

  Spot on. It had been puzzling me, too.

  But then, at that point, neither of us knew what plans Aunt Jacqueline had for me – for both of us.

  2

  I didn’t talk much on the drive back from the station. Neither did Tom. Instead, we were both subjected to a bridge monologue delivered in short, sharp sentences by my Aunt Jacqueline. She began by analysing a new overcall as we pulled off the car park, continued with her views on the Texas convention while we were negotiating the traffic on the High Street, and concluded with a few disparaging remarks on Tom’s play as we drew up outside her semi on the edge of town.

  ‘I can play bridge,’ I told Tom as he reached into the boot of his ancient Morris Minor for my suitcase. ‘Auntie taught me yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘Did she?’ Tom asked.

  ‘Of course not,’ Aunt Jacqueline snapped angrily. ‘How could I teach a child something I can’t even teach my own partner?’

  ‘But Auntie …’ I protested.

  Ignoring me, my aunt turned to Tom. ‘It’s half past three,’ she said. ‘Be back here at six-thirty.’

  Tom looked puzzled. ‘Don’t you want me to come in?’

  My aunt lit another cigarette. ‘What for?’

  ‘Well, I thought Bobby might want some help with his suitcase.’

  ‘The boy’s carried it this far,’ my aunt said. ‘No reason why he can’t manage it the rest of the way.’

  Tom seemed as if he were about to argue, then, with a hangdog expression on his face, he climbed back into his car.

  ‘And remember,’ Aunt Jacqueline called after him, ‘six-thirty sharp.’

  Struggling with my case, I followed my aunt up what would have been called the garden path if the collection of weeds growing on either side of it could ever have reasonably been called a garden.

  At the front door, Aunt Jacqueline stopped and turned around. I expected her to take the keys out of her handbag, but she seemed much more interested in making sure that Tom was really leaving. She waited until his car had finally turned the corner, then crouched down in front of me, so that her eyes were level with mine. Her cheeks burned with anger, her thin lips were twisted in an ugly snarl. She could never have been an attractive woman at the best of times, but now, I recognised instinctively, I was seeing her at her worst.

  ‘There’s an orphanage just up the road,’ she hissed at me.

  ‘An … an orphanage,’ I stuttered.

  ‘It’s a terrible place. The orphans are kept half-starved, and at night there are rats which climb onto your face, and eat your eyes out.’

  My lower lip was beginning to tremble. ‘Please, Auntie …’ I begged.

  ‘And if you ever talk to Tom about playing bridge again, if you even hint to him that you know the basic rules, that orphanage is where you’re going. Do you understand me?’

  ‘Yes, Auntie,’ I said, fighting back the tears.

  What else could I have replied? For the moment, she held all the cards, and I had no choice but to obey her.

  3

  It is almost impossible to describe the state of my aunt’s living room as it appeared to me when I saw it for the first time. The abandoned site of a rock concert would have looked tidy in comparison. The epicentre of a dustbin bomb explosion could scarcely have looked worse. It was every housewife’s worst nightmare, a composite of all the “before” pictures ever used in adverts for miracle cleaners.

  Bridge magazines, for which at least a square mile of pine forest must have laid down its life, lay in piles all over the ash-grey carpet. Scatter cushions were scattered far further than their designers had ever intended. A layer of dust, as thick as plywood, lay smugly on top of the sideboard.

  It was more of a shock to me, I suppose, because it was such a contrast to the home I had just left. Every Saturday morning, for as long as I could remember, Mother and I had cleaned the front parlour, polishing the furniture and photographs, vacuuming the carpet and picking hairs off the velveteen sofa. It had been a labour of love for Mother, and I had loved doing it with her.

  ‘You could eat your food off the floor in here,’ Mother used to say – and she’d been quite right. Only one thing in Aunt Jacqueline’s house had ever been the object of her love – the trophy case. There it stood, to the right of the gas fire, the glass front sporting a shine which would have made any professional window cleaner green with envy. And how many cups and medals there were! For all my aunt’s complaints about Tom, he couldn’t be such a bad partner, I thought – though I wisely decided to keep my observation to myself.

  My stomach rumbled, and I realised I had had nothing to eat since the sandwich Sadie gave me when I got on the train.

  ‘I’m hungry, Auntie,’ I said.

  My aunt lit up a cigarette. ‘See what there is in the kitchen.’

  ‘The kitchen?’

  ‘It’s through there,’ Aunt Jacqueline told me, pointing to the door next to the trophy case. ‘But I don’t expect you’ll find much.’

  ****

  Tom arrived, as instructed, at exactly half-past six.

  ‘How are you, young Bobby?’ he asked, tousling my hair, and favouring me with a colourless smile. ‘Settling in all right?’

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ I said politely – just as Mother would have wished.

  It was the truth, too, if by “settling in” you mean being assigned a room and making yourself a meal of Marmite and crispbreads.

  My aunt came down from her bedroom, where she’d been changing into a severe suit of black and white check.

  ‘I’m ready,’ she announced.

  ‘Where’s the baby-sitter?’ Tom asked.

  ‘Baby-sitter?’ my aunt repeated, as if the word was alien to her vocabulary. ‘What baby-sitter?’

  ‘You’re surely not intending to leave young Bobby on his own, are you?’ Tom said.

  ‘Why not?’ my aunt questioned. She turned to me. ‘You’re a big boy now, aren’t you … err … Bobby. Look after yourself, can’t you?’

  ‘Yes, Auntie,’ I said, ac
ting the Brave Little Trooper – as my mother had always taught me to.

  ‘Still and all, I don’t think it’s right,’ Tom objected.

  Aunt Jacqueline stubbed out her cigarette in an already-overflowing ashtray. ‘The only thing you need to worry about is your bidding once you get to the club – that is, if you’re coming to the club,’ she said. ‘If you’re not, tell me now, while there’s still the chance I can get another partner.’

  Tom hesitated then shrugged his shoulders apologetically in my direction.

  ‘We won’t be late,’ he promised.

  ‘Watch some television if you want to, then get yourself off to bed,’ my aunt told me as she headed for the front door.

  ****

  I didn’t go to bed, of course. After all the excitement of the day, I simply wasn’t sleepy. Besides, a strange empty house can hold innumerable terrors for a nine-year-old, and I was afraid that if I allowed myself to fall asleep, the demons would get me. Thus it was that I was still wide awake when Tom’s car pulled up in front of the house a little after eleven.

  Crouching at the top of the stairs, I heard them come in.

  ‘Whisky?’ Aunt Jacqueline asked.

  ‘Please,’ Tom replied gratefully. ‘Err … how do you think we did tonight, Jackie?’

  ‘Not badly,’ my aunt conceded reluctantly. ‘But if you’d played for a two-two trump break on Board Twenty-Seven – as you should have – we’d have done even better.’

  For the next half hour, Aunt Jacqueline talked over the evening’s games, re-living her triumphs in all their glory and occasionally lavishing faint praise on her partner. Only when she finally paused for breath did Tom speak – and then, what he said had nothing to do with bridge.

  ‘Could we … could we go upstairs?’ he asked tentatively.

  Silence.

  ‘Please!’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Aunt Jacqueline said, with a sigh.

  There was a pattern to this, I was to learn later. If my aunt considered her partner had played well, she’d invite him in for a drink and eventually – after making him almost beg for it – she’d take him to bed and administer some soldier’s comfort. However, if she was displeased with his performance at the bridge table, she would refuse to perform too – and he wouldn’t even get through the front door.