Just Relations

by Rodney Hall

  – If you’d only grown taller, Miss McAloon aimed her deadly dart at her son with practised accuracy. Then you’d have been kinder to your mother. That’s what I’ve always said. She settled back in the passenger seat.

  Peter let in the clutch, backing sharply. Rose and George looked at their benefactress through the flat glass of the windscreen, seeing her in an oblong frame like an exhibit, a work of art, a dried arrangement, careering backwards … dwindling. The Land Rover swung round recklessly and sped off, bearing with it plans for a knitted tree if such a thing could be imagined.

  – Bloody stickybeaking old bat, growled George. He collected a loose gob of spit and squirted it out as if now cleansed of guilt for not satisfying whatever need his mother was continually parading and reminding him about.

  Three

  At last Vivien had a reply from Aunt Annie, a rambling letter full of news about the peonies this season and how she’d just discovered they originated in Japan would you believe, about Mrs Cox and Mrs Pye down the road, about the new vicar and how he plasters his hair forward over his bald patch as if that didn’t give him away, and what’s the matter with a bald patch she’d like to know, when it was known to give men a more mature and thoughtful appearance which heaven knows most of them could do with, about a brief meeting with Mr Rosenbloom in the baker’s and how he had bought wholemeal bread whilst she bought the thinnest sliced milk loaf of course and how Mr Rosenbloom had heard from his long-lost sister a doctor or something who’d visited last Wednesday and behaved in a most peculiar manner towards Aunty, so familiar though they’d never had the pleasure, taking her hand and weeping, how this lady doctor had thanked her from the bottom of her heart from time to time and ended with the offer of a holiday in Berlin should Aunty feel inclined with all the luxuries guaranteed. As Aunty said, when you get to the age of ninety you don’t think much more of foreign holidays than you do of all-night parties. I laughed right in her face poor thing, Aunty wrote, but who could help it? And what of Arthur Swan, she enquired, was he still coming round offering his advice on how to run the world? Give the darling old ratbag a tweak on the ear because I’m thinking about him, she wrote. Oh God, Vivien love, what fools we can be and no mistake. I’m so very happy that you like my house and I cannot tell you what it means to me that you intend to settle there. It’s like waiting for someone without knowing it; and then suddenly there they are and you find you’ve been waiting. I feel very much at rest, thank you. And I’ve begun all sorts of tidying up I’ve been meaning to do for years. So now I have a little surprise dear, I was cleaning out my treasure trunk, ‘Aunty’s Dump’, do you remember it? when I found a bunch of letters I’d quite forgotten. Among them I discovered this one from your dear mother which I thought you might like to have as a memento.

  It made Vivien’s hand tingle. She tested the deckle-edged paper, it communicated strangeness, she was too nervous to open it. From so long ago. Herself afraid. So she tucked it safely in her purse. Straight away taking it out again, she couldn’t bear that. She opened it with a reckless impulsive gesture: at one glance Vivien knew what she most needed to know. Her mother could write, her mother was, or had been, a real person. This was the most definite thing about her, this letter.

  She stood and savoured an impression of the style, the handwriting. Her eyes were ready to help. She was still the little girl telling lies about her mother because she didn’t have one: her mother the aircraft pilot who died in a crash, her mother the famous pianist killed while on a concert tour, her mother the explorer kidnapped by bandits in the Sahara Desert and never heard of again, or lost in the Amazon jungle, her mother who had murdered a baby and was living out a life of shame secretly in prison, her mother the British spy and the government not daring to leak where she had been captured for fear of letting out State Secrets, or more simply her mother who had eloped shamefully for the sake of love.

  This was the first time she had ever seen her mother’s handwriting. Vivien was over the initial shock, the basic conundrum solved … yes, her mother did have writing of her own. How ludicrous to be letting the tears run in public. You have to pull yourself together. It’s only a letter. The letter must say something. Who knows what? Wasting time, crying. Vivien took fright at the infinite space in her hand, the discovery she would make the moment she read the first words, fate taking an unasked part in her life, her vessel hurtling forward into nothing. Or falling? That dreadful Brinsmead woman. Was this the straw? the drowning person’s lifebelt, a reprieve, a turning point, could she expect to remain the same once she’d read it? Might this scrap of paper hold her up?

  Previously, all she had of her mother was the wedding photograph; father looking unlike himself, sleek as a plaster dummy, his arm linked through the plump arm of a rather insipid girl with her bridal veil pulled too low across her forehead, a girl with teeth and nostrils, wearing pearls of a kind.

  The handwriting was there in front of Vivien, bold fluent writing, no doubt about that, and fast. The signs were clear, the woman who wrote this wrote often and well. Elegant capital Ps and Gs were balanced by the dashing squareness of the capital Ts. The blunt tails of the ys and qs given quality by her Greek es. Most of all, the flow across the page, letters of her personality.

  With relief Vivien admitted that her real and unspoken guesses (of shame and idiocy and squalor) had been wrong, for here was the evidence: her mother had been educated, she wrote positively stylishly. The occasional word lodged in Vivien’s mind from a cursory look at the whole page … incredible, elocution, monster, Gregory, straightforward, lovely. The rest was calligraphy, character, history, a voice. What did she use this voice to say to Aunty? What words had she sent to her relative by marriage? And incidentally to her unknown daughter, the daughter she must have been pregnant with at the time of writing? Only one fragment survived as Vivien read the harmless trivia: we’re positive the baby is going to be a boy. Gregory said he will take an over-dose of sleeping pills if it’s a girl instead of a little ally for him. How we laughed! … love Esther. She didn’t mind. No she didn’t mind. Esther was forgiven and so was Annie. Gregory, Daddy that is, presented another problem. She’d need to think. Daddy who did, in fact, take an overdose of sleeping tablets twelve years later.

  – Thank you, she spoke. Yes, just as Aunty had once told her straight out that Daddy was dead so she could bear it and be done, now she had sent on this letter as soon as she found it among her papers. What would Esther think of a daughter who lived with a man sixteen years her junior? What would Aunty think of her on her knees in Aunty’s own church lipping at the genitals of an impotent giant bearing her name McTaggart and to whom she was also Great-aunt Annie? Vivien glanced up past the hotel to the little slaughterhouse where a group of crows held the grass captive, all eyes and beaks. I shall write to Aunty and ask her outright what my mother died from. I shall tell her I am Bill Swan’s mistress too. But at this moment Aunt Annie seemed curiously vague, her motives unaccountable, her presence weakened.

  So Vivien stood on the powdery road, burdened yet elated with new knowledge. The ever-present wind, sweeping her hair over to one side, folding her skirt against her legs, tugged at the letter. So she continued, her most private thoughts naked to the world. Rainless clouds swooped close down to the mountain. And she was being watched too, you may be sure. Not only by decrepit ladies spying from creeper-infested verandahs, but openly by Mr Rupert Ping, outside his workshop, practising the dainty habit of moving from foot to foot on the spot, a featherweight boxer. Those clouds swept out of sight so fast you knew it was the world turning and the clouds themselves motionless, the headlong rush of the mountain into your life. Mr Ping stared unblinkingly at her, attracting her attention, no question about that, the long scar down his cheek making him appear to be smiling but he wasn’t. Vivien felt she needed somewhere to sit quietly to cry or gloat over her new possession, the most unexpected gift, a mother. But she obeyed his unspoken will: put the letter away, folding it inside Aunty�
�s letter, slipping it in the envelope then shutting it securely in her purse. Mr Ping’s scar smiled; she was just the person to appreciate what he had to show.

  Vivien knew this interview with the Chinaman would be about the disappearance of Tony who worked for him. The guilty are always a step ahead, and how guilty she was, Tony not seen since their fiasco in the church. The welder unable to cope with the work at his age and the apprentice never there. I was the one who sent him wild, she admitted, preparing herself for judgment among the workshop tools. She walked towards that metal cave, the dry day puffed around her shoes. The clouds raced or the world raced. She felt dizzy. That letter in her purse was a lifebelt. She would be safe, eventually she would.

  Rupert Ping led her inside. Vivien was immediately impressed by the suggestion of a crypt, symbols and emblems on the walls; crosses stars moons, the crucible of oil, bottles without labels, bottles of light. The floor of the workshop congested with broken-down machines. The air’s heavy metallic smell imposed utter silence. The realities outside no longer existed. She thought of herself and Tony in the abandoned church. Here was its negative, its living half of meanings and functions. But in the apse of this place the altar had not been dismantled to make room for a heap of rotting linoleum. By contrast, she stood hypnotized by what her guide showed her: an altar, yes, the great steel column of the hoist, and on top of it a cow standing terrifyingly still. Unearthly and sinister, this cow called to mind things familiar, nightmares of falling naked and memories of being alone. The cow gazed out over Vivien’s head with huge glassy eyes. Nose varnished, teats ripe with sawdust, legs steady as stone, this was Dame Nellie Melba about to launch into The Holy City. She disdained to acknowledge the audience, up there awaiting her cue, attuned to that adoring hush, heavenly intimations already in the ears, the note about to be uttered.

  Vivien’s reaction falling short of expectation, Ping’s whole attention was on her, gathering clues. He raised his fine bare arm, young enough for a man of thirty though creased with herringbone scabs, pointing up to the cow on the vehicle hoist.

  – That’s Alice, he introduced them.

  – Alice! shrieked Vivien, the word yapping in echoes along the iron walls.

  While Alice remembered bellowing for help, the calf was killing her, and even her loved mistress with the gentle hands roared away when she was needed most.

  Instead of the expected, instead of seeing the point, Viv turned her back and ran. She clattered on stilts out across the huge concrete floor, the oily air resisting her tight lungs, her breasts an impediment, the earth turning turning the opposite way so she must run faster to move at all. Fresh in her mind the smashed truck, its one wheel meditatively rotating while Bill intoned curious syllables wreck wreck queer Alice Iris and his face still dark from the strain of tilting the truck to allow her one glimpse of the corpse’s arm jutting from a pulp of meat, a twisted head of neatly combed hair. Also an older memory of her own mother staring her not quite in the face, eyes huge with indifference. It was gone, illusory, untrue. Vivien ran from the horror of Alice and Mercy Ping’s husband, from the voice of a murderer, the taxidermist’s fastidiousness, the affront to her animal-loving British sense of what is proper.

  Could he hear her give-away panting? She blundered into the blinding day, driven by panic, straight out yes to the road knowing there could be only one sanctuary, Miss Brinsmead’s shop; there she’d be safe with Miss Brinsmead, if only if only. And of course Miss Brinsmead, being a lover, knew when this moment arrived. Standing with her back bravely to the cat and its narrowed eyes, her hand on the date, refuting the shop’s complaints, defying that gossiping crowd of frocks, she prepared herself for an emotional onslaught.

  – Someone wants me, she said to her brother. I’ll leave the shop to you.

  He was surprised into taking her place. So she bustled out patting her wire entanglement of hair. If only if only, she heard Vivien longing for her protection. She ran across the road. A terrified chicken sprinting in front of her dodged aside at the shed door as Vivien lunged, sightless with sunshine, into her saviour’s arms. Felicia Brinsmead bore her up joyfully, triumph in her heart and her flesh young again; why should she care if the street was filled with watching judges, mouldy lumps of stone on verandahs cracking open their eyes, trees gesticulating, the hundred doors of the Mountain Hotel edging open so the faces of the dead could spy out accusing her. Fido had prepared her for worse than this. She nursed her lovely woman. The sky tugged stiff as blue canvas in the wind.

  Events changed direction, the atmosphere changed, the mountain itself ripened a shade darker.

  Now came Sebastian’s turn to hear the imperative call of love. He heaped iron weights from the scales on top of the newspapers for safety’s sake and marched to the rescue, past lines of rubber boots at attention. He stepped outside, his pace quickening with agitation, the doors clashing behind him. The town was alive with its owners all answering the summons, even the matriarch McAloon being carried out on her porch in the cocoon of her private smell and setting herself up with a brass telescope. Grotesquely ugly with their fatty noses and sticking out ears, the onlookers sensed the unexpected. And sure enough the saint burst through those PROVISIONS HABERDASHERY BOOTS & SHOES doors, his halo awry and rage actual rage transfiguring his face, a thick roar emerging from his throat, jealousy shaking him free of his bland contemplation of God’s mysteries, the sublime tapestry in tatters. He thought this affair of hers had been dead. But no. So he was Oliver Cromwell, bristling with principles. For half a century the fear had lurked in him that it would come to this, despite all appearances, that one day the scandal of his sister’s affair with Rupert Ping would be common gossip. Grateful to see Vivien Lang restraining her before she had a chance to make a total fool of herself, he touched her as he passed to thank her. And now he was running, a bull elephant, slow to gather speed, into the shed where he had never been before. Ping had to be stopped. There must be an end to his sending out allurements and inducing infidelity. Witnesses were swept up by his bellow and carried in behind him, drawn on the wind he created.

  – Ping, he called on his enemy.

  The audience assembled itself in that dim place, the show had begun. No one had ever heard Sebastian Brinsmead address Rupert Ping by name before, their mutual hatred was known to be too deep. The studio orchestra raced in full flight to a climax and stopped dead.

  – This is idolatry, Sebastian whispered with respect. It’s disgusting. We won’t have such things in a Christian town.

  The congregation gazed at the theatrical cow high on her hoist: creased neck, sharp bony structure of haunches and great pendulous shapes hung in the skin sack, her brow wrinkled, a wise woman’s expression. So Alice contemplated the same truth as before, just a bit above their heads, her varnished nose in the air, eyes glassy with revelations, she balanced miraculously, a thing of beauty.

  – She’s dead, Mr Ping excused himself.

  Ian McTaggart remembered a time long ago with a cow on an altar and what began with laughter and dancing ended with … surely not … murdering his brother and two neighbours. Could that be right? The mind plays such damn tricks; the night of sticky hands and gagging nausea. Then dawn and the shores of a lake in the desert, a scattering of red flowers, men down on their knees eating the stones with gratitude.

  Only Uncle could break the mood of righteous indignation. Sebastian, deflated, lost purpose: had he misunderstood Felicia yet again?

  – You came to live among us when we was gold prospectin Rupie, Uncle said. When Merce was as pretty as a doll. An now we’ve give up the idea of findin a fortune for a couple of hours work, and Mercy dead too, are yer tryin to tell us somethin old son? Is that it? Have we slipped back into cattle folk? You’re givin us a message, am I right?

  – I reckon we seen enough, Mum Collins declared almost as upset as if it was her own Myrtle on the hoist. Heathen practices, I call it. Uncle you’re soft in the head! She elbowed her way out and relatives follow
ed her example, which meant just about everybody eventually. Fifty years they’d waited for this row, for Sebastian to have it out with Ping, for a brother’s jealousy to be given its head. They left reluctantly, disappointed yet again.

  Only Felicia had resisted the pull of what was going on, smiling abstractedly, her arms about Vivien, her rancid bundle of hair at a tender angle. But it was true that her mind was not wholly on the job of comforting this desirable person. There was some future which she ought to foretell, forestall; the message was vague but urgent, connections not fitting together, her immediate pleasure putting her off her stroke as a seer. And now it was too late. Bessie Collins flouncing out of the workshop with a herd of goats at her heels. And then Uncle putting an end to contemplation by standing in the middle of the street, waving one walkingstick, shaky from his fortnight in bed, hanging on to his ally Sebastian and shouting gamely.

  – Tomorrer we meet. There’s a meetin. Sebbie an me has decided on a meetin.

  Felicia heard. But she was still clutching the warm shell of love, wrestling with shapeless premonitions, murmuring that there was still one sign to come, Vivien, though I can’t foresee it however I try. She stood under the gallop of that sky in the shadow of the mountain now switching from green to grey, chilled by the passive body of her beloved young stranger, still murmuring, her broad face and the helpless bags of her figure, the nodding coagulation of hair, emitting the staleness of the unwashed, unable to stop falling, more yet to come, a vision swam clearly into mind, of herself with Sebastian in Venice: him wandering aimlessly dignified inspecting ancient stone carvings, while she, swearing she would never travel again, stood electrified by a sign, a portent, a notice nailed to the door of the Basilica Santa Maria della Salute BEWARE, FALLING ANGELS.

  Vivien recollected her manners and patted the old lady, accepting her duty as comforter, forgetting altogether that it was she who had sought comfort, the macabre insight into Mr Ping’s obsessions less threatening now. She helped Felicia home, escorting her right into the shop, though the olives had a few tart things to say about that on behalf of the League of Decency.