Sun Child

by Angela Huth

  A short time later Emily followed her aunt out of the room with a feeling of great wretchedness. She hated at any time to be stared at, and the other diners now openly watched their exit. Aunt Tabitha seemed strangely unsure of her step. Though the tables were set wide apart she managed to bump into them, provoking sharp looks from their occupants. Embarrassment – an almost permanent emotion since she had been here – made Emily quite stern.

  ‘Come on, Aunt Tab,’ she said.

  Upstairs, as was her habit every night, Aunt Tab poured herself a glass of brandy ‘to warm me up’. She slumped into an armchair. Her legs were slung apart, bulbous, against the old dog rug that covered the chair. Emily, opposite, averted her eyes from the wadge of thigh, also visible, that puffed out from knicker elastic. Hands cupped over her nose, she watched instead the bloated face. Once, it might have been handsome. Now, swollen lids shut, ragged mouth turned down, it was all askew, too revealing. It was difficult to feel sorry for Aunt Tab, looking as she did.

  ‘Game of snakes and ladders, Emily?’

  ‘No thank you.’

  ‘Good. Chocolate?’

  ‘No thank you.’

  Various dogs breathed uneasily in the silence. The gas fire hissed. To think, this, every night. Emily rubbed cold hands on her cold knees.

  ‘It’s the evenings I can’t abide so well, you know.’ Aunt Tabitha had opened her eyes. She had said the same thing every night. Next, there would be the bit about the Common. ‘In the old days we would spend every afternoon walking over the Common. All of them, racing about, loving it. But they’ve aged since the war. Some of them died, whenever it was.’ She gulped at the brandy. ‘You have to consider your dogs. Have to judge when to cut down their exercise. But those walks tired us out nicely, you know. After dinner we’d sit by the fire, all of us, each one in his special place, and feel wonderfully sleepy.’ She smiled, and added, ‘Some of the older boys would nod off before bedtime and I’d have to wake them up to get them upstairs. “Wake up, Rudolph”, I’d say. “Wake up, Rudolph, or you’ll be cold down here all night”.’ She kicked one feeble foot in the air, dislodging a loose shoe. ‘He’d wake up and smile at me.’

  Emily stood up. She would go to bed now, count the final hours till morning on the chart hidden under her pillow. She wanted to hear no more. Aunt Tab still kicked at an invisible Rudolph.

  ‘Angus handed over the whole pack to me before he went to the war. The whole pack before he went to the war …’

  ‘Good night, Aunt Tab.’

  ‘He put the whole responsibility in my hands. Are you going to bed now? Well. If he’d come back and we’d … He’d have found them all in good shape.’

  ‘I’ll see you in the morning.’

  ‘I don’t think he would have thought I’d let him down.’

  Aunt Tab didn’t notice Emily leave the room. Her glass was raised in her hands, her eyes smeary with pink liquid.

  ‘Angus …’ she was saying.

  Emily’s camp bed had been put up beside Aunt Tab’s single bed. The room was chaotic, but at least no dogs slept there. Only Phoebe’s basket, left as she had died in it, stood in one corner. Emily, lying down, listened for a while to Aunt Tab stumbling about in the next room, filling water bowls, talking to the dogs. In contrast to her firm stride by day, her unsure evening step was unnerving. What exactly was the matter with Aunt Tab? Was she just very tired? Whatever it was, Emily wanted to see no more of it, ever again. She prayed to sleep quickly, because she dreaded to see the struggle Aunt Tab must surely have undressing. Her hand trembling, partly with cold, she put out the light.

  Brightness suddenly behind her lids. She woke, surprised. It wasn’t morning. Her back was to Aunt Tab’s bed. She heard a groan. She spun round, fearful.

  Aunt Tab, quite naked, was clambering with some difficulty on to the end of her own bed. Her loose breasts lolled over the mound of her stomach, the nipples shockingly brown: a curled up foot, out of control, kept slipping off the blanket.

  ‘Aunt Tab! Whatever …?’ Emily heard the scream in her own voice. Aunt Tab grunted. Her face seemed very dark. Heart attack … purple face. Wolf said something about a man in the street he’d seen with a purple face having a heart attack. The realisation blazed through Emily’s head. Her own fingers were claws over her eyes, but she could still see.

  Aunt Tab had mounted the bed now. She stood upright, for perhaps a second, back to Emily, poised like a diver. A black line thin as wire split the obscene expanse of her bottom. Pulp flesh. If she fell, the whole thing would break apart, rotten fruit.

  She fell. As she crashed to the floor, Emily screamed again. Next door a dog whimpered. Then silence.

  Emily ran to her aunt. Her whole body, now, was askew, a slack old cushion flung on the worn carpet.

  ‘Aunt Tab …?’ Emily’s hand touched the head. It was warm. The rough grey hair had fallen into a maze of white partings. ‘Aunt Tab, are you all right ?’

  No sound. Eyes shut, oozing tears. Mouth half open, oozing saliva.

  Emily ran, blindly. She was aware of the stairs, the sudden warmth of red carpet under her feet. Lights, dressed people round the bar. Talking, laughing. They didn’t notice her at first. Then one of them gave a shout.

  ‘The child’s sleepwalking!’

  ‘Please. Aunt Tab’s ill.’ Her hands and legs shook. ‘Quickly.’

  The owner of the country club, a nice pale woman, was beside her.

  ‘I’m coming at once. Reg, give me a hand.’ Her husband’s mouth fell open, making a black hole under his wide moustache. They ran back up the stairs, after Emily. At the sitting room door Emily stopped.

  ‘Wait a minute, please.’

  ‘Why? We’ll come with you.’

  ‘Please.’

  They let her go back to the bedroom alone. Quickly she pulled down from behind the door Aunt Tab’s old plaid dressing gown, misty with dogs’ hair. She threw this over the body. It hadn’t moved. She ran back to the sitting room.

  ‘Please help her quickly,’ she said. ‘I think she’s had a heart attack.’

  They left her and she went to sit on the stairs. The carpet pricked her skin through her pyjamas. She looked down at the lights in the hall, and listened to the laughing people in the bar. Gradually, her shivering stopped. And later, when they gave her something hot to drink in a strange warm room, they told her Aunt Tab hadn’t had a heart attack. She had merely eaten something that hadn’t agreed with her.

  ‘The prunes, perhaps.’ The moustache gave a sort of laugh. ‘She wasn’t at all herself, but she’ll be all right in the morning.’

  They took her back to bed. Aunt Tab snored in the dark, the same shaped hump, under the bedclothes, as she had been on the floor. Emily’s own bed was cold. Her head on her pillow was crowded with the white grain of jumbled words. Mama and Papa, why did you send me here? Why did you leave me?

  The questions pounded but the answers lay beyond some unreachable horizon. She didn’t cry-she’d tell them she didn’t cry – and eventually a winter dawn paled the curtains.

  Emily was watching when Aunt Tab woke at seven. The relief, at the sight of her open eyes, made her very tired.

  ‘Lads! ‘ cried Aunt Tab, heartily, as all the other mornings. The dogs came snortling in from the next room. ‘Morning all,’ she said, shifting under the bedclothes. ‘I had the strangest dream.’

  At the sound of her voice the dogs lapped more eagerly round her bed, some rising stiffly on their back legs, trying to jump upon it. Aunt Tab smiled, a grey mouth. She slipped one hand from under the sheets, let it hang down. The dogs scrabbled to lick it, tongues with ghostly shadows of visible breath.

  ‘There, lads,’ said Aunt Tab, softly.

  Seven

  ‘Coral got stinking drunk while you were away,’ said Wolf. ‘She fell down the back stairs and twisted her ankle. It was quite funny, really.’

  ‘Well, Aunt Tab had a heart attack. She went purple in the face just like that man you told
me about in the street. They told me it wasn’t a heart attack-she was just ill or something. But of course, I knew.’

  ‘Course. They can’t fool you about a heart attack.’

  ‘What does Coral do when she’s drunk?’

  ‘She’s absolutely revolting. She sways about and drops things and nobody can understand what she’s saying very well, though it seems to be the same thing over and over again. Then she’s inclined to take her clothes off. She starts tugging at her scarf and undoing the buttons of her shirt. That drives my father really mad. He starts to pull her from the room so that I shan’t see, so she hits him and they have a real old ding-dong.’ Wolf paused. ‘In a way it’s quite funny, except that my father usually comes off worse. He’s not as strong as Coral.’

  ‘Poor him,’ said Emily.

  They sat on a bale of old hay in the barn loft. In the last few months they had tidied it up a bit, and stored a collection of secret things on the one shelf : a tin of biscuits, a knife, a pen that wrote with invisible ink, and Emily’s spasmodic diary, which she sometimes let Wolf see. They had left the carpet of chaff and straw : it dulled their footsteps and hid the rotting floorboards. They had tried but failed to open the small window in the sloping roof. Its glass was matted with cobwebs and dirt, and through it a shaft of dun light speared the brown gloom. The place smelt of must and old apples – a persistent smell that didn’t, like more sophisticated scents, fade with familiarity. No one ever disturbed them in the loft, and they revelled in the warmth of its privacy.

  ‘I once saw Coral in the bath by mistake,’ said Wolf.

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘She was lying back with these two sort of mountains sticking out of the soapy water.’ He giggled. ‘She was absolutely revolting. As a matter of fact, I don’t think even my father goes for her that much without any clothes on. Sometimes, when she comes in, I’ve seen him turn his head away when she just takes off her hat.’

  ‘Aunt Tab hadn’t got any clothes on when she fell off the bed,’ said Emily. ‘She was pretty revolting, too.’ They both giggled again, quietly, not looking at each other. Then Wolf caught Emily’s eye.

  ‘I suppose we’ll all become like that in the end,’ he said.

  ‘What, you mean all fat and squidgy?’

  ‘Yuh.’

  ‘We won’t. Not if we’re careful.’

  ‘You bet we will.’

  Emily glanced at Wolf’s bony knees straining against his jeans.

  ‘I can’t imagine you fat and disgusting,’ she said, ‘ever.’ More boldly, Wolf let his eyes run over Emily.

  ‘Can’t really imagine you, either,’ he said.

  They heard someone moving about in the barn beneath them. Wolf leaned over to look through the trap door, which they had fastened back. Usually, fearing no disturbances here, they only shut it on ill-defined but special occasions.

  ‘It’s your mother,’ said Wolf, and leant back against the wooden wall again.

  They listened as she climbed, hesitantly, the ladder: watched as her head emerged through the hole in the floor, the edges of her hair shifting with quiet colours in the winter loft-light. Then her neck, muffled in a long woollen scarf of multicoloured stripes, and finally her bosom, taut under a sloppy dark satin shirt that flickered like her hair. When her waist was floor level she stopped, lifted her hand and buried her face in a bunch of snowdrops she held. In the poor light they were a solid lump of white crystal. My mother is a mermaid, said Emily to herself, she’s come up from the bottom of the sea, white rock in her hand.

  ‘Just the first,’ said Fen. ‘There are going to be masses and masses in the orchard. It’s going to be absolutely white.’ She waved the bunch in an arc through the gloom, and guided them to swoop down, together, a clutch of falling stars, on to the floor once more. Through the permanent hay and apple smell they had cut a small trail of some lighter scent, which vanished in a moment.

  ‘Hope you didn’t mind my coming up without asking permission,’ Fen was saying. ‘I just wanted to show you.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ said Wolf. ‘You can come any time.’ From the tone of his voice Emily knew that he meant what he said, and what he had left out was that Coral could never come. ‘Why don’t you get right in?’ he added. ‘It’s not terribly warm or comfortable, but we like it.’

  Fen appreciated the compliment, but shook her head, smiling. Her skin was still brown from the French sun, her teeth as white as the snowdrops.

  ‘Heavens, no. I won’t disturb you any more. I’m just going in to put these in water. Then I’m going to cook you an amazing tea. Sweet corn with poached eggs and sausages.’

  ‘Fantastic,’ said Wolf.

  ‘Aunt Tab’ll be putting snowdrops on Phoebe’s grave,’ said Emily.

  ‘What?’ said Fen. She was already slipping away from them, head only left now, a final smile that conveyed some uncontainable happiness.

  ‘She’s a smasher, your mother,’ Wolf said, when she had gone.

  ‘I know,’ said Emily.

  ‘Where’s your father this weekend?’

  ‘Working in Brussels. He’s always working.’

  ‘That’s men,’ said Wolf. ‘It’s bad luck they have to work so hard. I wish your mother’d stayed for a bit.’

  Emily lay back more comfortably on the bale of hay. Now that Fen had gone the loft seemed darker than it had done before her arrival.

  ‘Perhaps in the summer,’ she said, ‘we could make a kind of restaurant up here and invite the grown-ups. They’d have to pay of course, but we’d make them menus and things.’

  ‘There wouldn’t have to be any candles,’ said Wolf, ‘or the whole place’d go straight up in flames.’

  ‘Course not, stupid.’

  ‘Well, they have candles in real restaurants.’

  ‘You wouldn’t think it a soppy idea, though ?’

  ‘Not really. Men work in restaurants.’ Wolf was chewing a piece of hay. ‘We’d have to ask my father but not Coral. We couldn’t have her falling about in here spoiling it all. How could we manage that?’

  There was a long silence between them.

  ‘We’ll think of a way,’ said Emily. They fell back into easy silence, each thinking of a way. They listened to the purr of a couple of pigeons in the barn beneath them, a lulling accompaniment to their concentrated thoughts, dissipating them almost immediately. Then, abruptly, they heard the noise of a car swinging into the drive. At once they were both alert, craning their heads through the hole in the floor. Emily began to climb down the ladder.

  ‘Perhaps it’s Papa home early for a surprise,’ she said.

  Wolf followed her. At the bottom of the ladder they saw instantly that the car was a strange one. Kevin’s.

  ‘Oh, him,’ said Emily, quietly. ‘He hasn’t been around for ages.’

  They stayed where they were, in the shadows of the barn, without moving. Kevin hooted the horn, an ugly blare in the shrill quiet of the afternoon. He got out of the car and looked about, much as he had the first time he came. Almost at once Fen came running from the house, the ends of her long scarf flailing behind her, laughing, shouting something they could not hear. Kevin caught her in his arms and lifted her up so that for a moment she was raised right off the ground. She was standing again, but they still clung to each other. Kevin’s face was buried in her hair, her scarf: his hands pried about her shoulders.

  ‘Whew!’ Wolf breathed quietly to Emily. She sensed his body, close to hers, was stiff. ‘Everyone seems to love your mother so much,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, they do.’ For her part, Emily felt a sudden ache behind her eyes. She watched, unblinking, as her mother and Kevin went up the path to the house, arm in arm. ‘We might as well go in too.’

  ‘You’d never see Coral hugging anyone like that, she’d be afraid of untidying her hair, silly old bag,’ said Wolf.

  They followed the grown-ups into the house. In the kitchen Fen and Kevin still had not separated. They leant against the Aga, Kevin�
��s arm around Fen’s waist, laughing at some private joke. They were unaware for a moment that the children watched them silently from the door.

  ‘Hello, Kevin,’ Emily said eventually. Kevin immediately moved away from her mother. His apparent pleasure in seeing Emily and Wolf was not reflected in Fen’s face. In fact, she looked suddenly annoyed. But she made an effort.

  ‘Look who’s here,’ she said, ‘after all this time. Isn’t that a lovely surprise?’

  ‘We need you to help finish our bird town,’ Emily said to Kevin. ‘We got a bit bored of it.’

  ‘Of course. Where is it?’ Kevin seemed enthusiastic.

  ‘Not now,’ said Fen. ‘Later. For heaven’s sake. Kevin’s only just arrived.’

  ‘After tea, then,’ said Wolf. ‘I’m ravenous.’

  ‘So’m I. You said you’d make us an amazing tea today, Mama.’

  ‘Oh, darling.’

  ‘You said in the loft.’

  ‘I know I did. But we didn’t know Kevin was coming then, did we ?’

  ‘What difference does that make? He’d probably like some too.’

  ‘Emily,’ Fen’s voice was sharp, her head high, her satin shirt a solid sheen over her breasts. ‘Sometimes, you’re the most selfish child. You never think of anyone else. You only think of what you want.’