“I can’t imagine anyone but Aunt——”
Callie broke off, said she’d change her mind about the cigarette and let Cecil light one for her.
Then, leaning back in her chair and with her eyes fixed on the fire, she said:
“Isn’t Aunt coming home again?”
“Not while Uncle Fred lives, dear. And he may go on for ages.”
“Will you tell me about it, Cecil? All their letters were perfectly hopeless, from the point of view of really telling one anything, and I haven’t seen her since before I went to Salonika, in nineteen-sixteen.”
“The Boulogne time was after that. She got leave from her hospital and came down to see me and we fixed it up that if ever I got twenty-four hours’ leave I was to let her know at Auteuil, and we’d try and have a day or an evening or something, in Paris. Every now and then, Callie, it came over me how extraordinary it was—Aunt, of all people, in a red and grey uniform, sitting in the ward at the Boulogne Hospital, and talking about Reggie, and the dogs, and the garden at Rock Place—it was like two worlds overlapping. We talked a lot about you, Callie.”
“She did a good deal for all of us, one way and another, when we were children. Especially for me, I think.”
“She did. One took rather a lot for granted, I fancy, in those days. That time at Boulogne was the first time I ever thought of Aunt as a real, individual person—not just as somebody who was always there. And I remember thinking that she wasn’t nearly as old as I’d always thought her.”
“About forty, would she be?”
“About that, I suppose. I don’t really know. Anyway, I was glad enough to see her. And then I did get twenty-four hours’ leave, months later, and I got her on the telephone. She asked me to fetch her from Auteuil, and we were to dine in Paris and do a show. I got out there—she’d got a room in rather a nice pension, with a garden. We had some coffee in the garden, and then a little maid came running out and said there was un monsieur—un gros monsieur—come to see her. Neither of us had the least idea who it was, and she went in and then, as she didn’t come back, I followed her. And there he was—in the salon—Uncle Fred more or less dropped from the skies, exactly as he used to turn up at Rock Place years ago without a word of warning.”
“How on earth did he get to France—in wartime?”
“He didn’t get there—he’d been there, for ages. Ill, off and on, and drinking like a fish. He told Aunt he’d been meaning to write, but of course he never had. He’d just turned up—as usual.”
“Was she glad or sorry?”
“As a matter of fact,” slowly said Cecil, “she was shocked, and so was I. Anyone would have been. You never saw anything like him, Callie. Gross, and bloated, and all the whites of his eyes gone yellow, and his hands shaking—it was simply horrible. Of course, he was obviously ill. But I don’t suppose he realized how ill.”
“Oh! Did she mind dreadfully?”
“She took it pretty well, on the whole. But there was one awful moment, when he sat down at the piano—of course, we didn’t go out anywhere—and he started to play—you know how he used to strum all the time—and to sing some old music-hall song or other, and looked up at her with a sort of dreadful leer on that great yellow face of his.”
“Oh, don’t!”
“It was quite the most grotesque thing I’ve ever seen. It was so utterly unreal.”
They gazed at each other in dismay.
“Is he going to die?”
“They thought he would—fairly soon. The doctors, I mean. That’s why they said it didn’t matter, his going back to Barbados if that was what he wanted. But, judging from what Aunt writes to my mother, he isn’t going to die in any hurry. He’ll just’ go on living out there, drinking rum-swizzles, and she’ll stay with him.”
The clock on the mantelpiece chimed eleven.
“I didn’t know it was so late,” exclaimed Callie. “We haven’t nearly finished talking!”
“I’m coming down with you to-morrow, to Rock Place. Any train you like. We’ll have time then to talk about all the really important things. Ourselves, and what’s going to happen to us.”
This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader
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Copyright © E. M. Delafield 1941
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