In a Good Light (15 page)

Mum and Dad made polite demurring noises, while out of the corner of my eye I saw Christian nodding solemnly.

‘I wonder . . .' Aunty Barbara glanced at her watch. ‘Do you think anywhere will be open? I've run out of ciggies.'

Dad offered to drive down to the newsagent's for her, but she said she needed the exercise, and in the end they left together, on foot.

On the way Dad must have had one of his Kind Words, because when they returned Aunty Barbara was more
cheerful, and even helped with the washing up. Her only other contribution to the running of the house was to suggest that Mum got a cleaner. ‘Big house like this. You need someone to come in and do for you.'

Mum dismissed the idea. She didn't see why someone else should clear up our dirt. ‘Besides, how could we afford it?' she added.

‘You could let out some of these rooms to paying guests,' Aunty Barbara said, scouring a dinner plate as though intent on removing the pattern as well as the remains of lunch.

‘I have thought about it,' Mum said, rescuing the plate, ‘but most of the time our spare rooms seem to be occupied by non-paying guests.'

Aunty Barbara failed to acknowledge this remark. ‘I'd have a cleaner like a shot if I could,' she went on. ‘But they take one look at my place and resign. The last one said, “I'm not working here, it's filthy!” I said, “Of course it's filthy. You don't think I'm going to pay you good money to clean a house that's already clean?” She didn't stay.'

For the first time I was allowed to stay up to see in the New Year, but in the end the grown-ups all fell asleep at about half past ten and had to be shaken awake in time for Auld Lang Syne. Christian was made to go out of the back door and come in at the front holding a lump of coal, for reasons no one could explain, and we toasted 1977 with Elderflower cordial, and made resolutions for the year to come. Christian and I promised not to go through shoes so fast, Donovan was going to eat vegetables, Dad would do something about the roof, Mum would sort out Grandpa Percy, and Aunty Barbara was going to put the whole damn thing behind her.

A FEW DAYS
after the bank holiday, Aunty Barbara announced her intention of going to the sales, and offered to take me with her.

‘You can help me choose Donovan's Christmas present,' she said.

Mum made no objection to this plan; in fact she was quite happy for me to deputise for her in any confrontation with the ugly forces of materialism. ‘No, I certainly don't feel left out,' she assured us. ‘You know I can't stand shopping. I'd only spoil it for you.'

My enthusiasm was entirely mercenary. Aunty Barbara had hinted that there might be something in it for me, and I sensed that she was the sort of person who might spend, as she did most other things, impulsively. The boys weren't interested in accompanying us. ‘We'll be looking at ladieswear and shoes,' Aunty Barbara told them, by way of deterrent.

‘We'll have lunch out,' she said, as we set off for the bus stop in a buffeting wind. ‘Perhaps you know somewhere nice we can go.' I didn't: we never ate out, except on holiday, as an absolute last resort. ‘We're going to have a lovely time,' Aunty Barbara insisted. She had dressed up for the occasion in a black wool dress and high-heeled suede boots that zipped to the knee. Her hair had been teased and rolled into a cottage loaf shape on top of her head, and her face was fiercely painted – black for the eyes and red for the lips. As we walked along she crushed me to her side so that I was almost suffocated by the gerbil coat. While I fought for breath she instructed me to call her Barbara. ‘I'm not a proper Aunty, and anyway it makes me feel old.'

She often returned to the subject of ageing and was full of advice and warnings. ‘Neck and hands, Esther, they're the first to show.' ‘Keep your face out of the sun, unless you want to end up looking like beef jerky.'

We sat on the top deck of the bus so that she could smoke, which she did with a curious grimacing expression to avoid growing pucker lines around her mouth. The wind had done its best to flatten the cottage loaf, and left streaky black tears at the corners of her eyes. When she opened her wallet to pay the conductor she caught sight of herself in the strip of mirror inside and gave a little scream.

‘What a fright!' she exclaimed, dabbing at the smudges with a scrap of tissue.

The precinct was crowded with shoppers when we arrived, but Aunty Barbara showed the same steely resistance to obstruction as she had in the matter of wood-gathering.

‘Hold tight,' she commanded, taking me by the wrist and elbowing a channel through the scrum that had formed around the entrance to Grantley's. ‘Excuse us, excuse us,' she cried, oblivious to the reproachful mutters that attended our progress.

In ladieswear she thumbed through rails of beaded evening gowns, clamping one after another against her as though about to perform a tango. I sat outside the fitting room on a vinyl stool while she tried on the pick of them. Every few minutes she would emerge between the curtains in a different costume and strike a pose for my approval. ‘What do you think?' she said, of a tissue-thin green dress with a pearl-crusted bodice.

‘Beautiful,' I said, meaning the dress, and Aunty Barbara looked pleased. ‘It's what Alan used to call a gownless evening strap,' she said with a laugh, and then her face darkened. She fingered the label, which was attached to a little bag of spare pearls. A nice touch that, I thought.

‘It
is
half price,' she went on. ‘The trouble is I don't go anywhere any more.' This melancholy thought seemed to spur her to a decision. ‘Oh, what the hell, I'll take it.' And she swished behind the curtain to change.

At the till the assistant wrapped the dress in layers of white tissue and laid it in a box with gold lettering on the lid, a gesture so glamorous it brought a lump to my throat.
Bienvenu à Biarritz
. As we made our way back to the escalators through bridalwear I allowed my fingers to trail wistfully over the yards of bunched taffeta and silk. Aunty Barbara must have seen my hand lingering on the hem of a peach bridesmaid's dress, as she stopped and said, ‘Oh, isn't that pretty? Do you like it?'

I nodded dumbly. It was the most beautiful, wondrous
creation, with gauzy sleeves, a wide satin sash, a ballooning skirt with a scalloped hem, covered buttons, and a heart-shaped neckline decorated with tiny peach rosebuds. I would
never
be able to wear it.

‘Let's see if it fits,' she said, plucking it from the rail and propelling me towards the cubicles once more. I struggled out of my nylon trousers and skinny-rib sweater to reveal a greyish vest and pants, while Aunty Barbara parted the petal layers of the underskirt and lowered the dress over my head. It rested on me as lightly as a cobweb, rustling and whispering when I turned, like something alive. ‘It does look rather lovely,' Aunty Barbara admitted, when she had finished tying the sash. ‘Perhaps not with socks and sneakers though.'

I gazed at my transformed reflection in the mirror with frank admiration, bobbing up and down to make the skirt puff up. ‘Let's get it,' Aunty Barbara decided. ‘That'll give Mummy a surprise.'

Won't it, I thought, as Aunty Barbara wrote out another cheque for a fantastic amount of money, far exceeding Mum's annual expenditure on clothes. When the shop assistant produced another of those monogrammed boxes and pressed it into my trembling hands I thought I would expire with happiness.

‘That was very expensive, wasn't it?' I said, to let her know that her generosity wasn't lost on me. Aunty Barbara nodded. ‘You must have loads of money.'

‘None at all,' she replied gaily. ‘But I've got plenty of cheques.'

We spent the next quarter of an hour in the millinery department trying on picture hats, an enterprise which finished the demolition job on the cottage loaf that the
wind had already begun. ‘There were some sensational hats at our wedding,' Aunty Barbara said, selecting a white fedora with rhinestones. She pulled it down over one eye and pouted at herself in the mirror. ‘They've fallen out of favour a bit nowadays. Like gloves. My mother had a drawer full of gloves: I don't think anyone outside the family ever saw the skin of her hands.' She laughed at this memory. ‘I've still got her pair of ivory glove-stretchers at home. I use them as salad tongs.'

This mention of food led us to the fourth floor in search of the restaurant. We sat at a curious kidney-shaped table on a curved banquette of bright green vinyl, and ate prawn cocktail out of giant brandy glasses. Another first. At home prawns were held to be a delicacy enjoyed only by royalty and their like. We were on one occasion permitted tinned shrimps, which Christian said looked just like a cat's bottom, and thereafter they vanished from the menu.

The restaurant was crowded with other successful shoppers: I could see carrier bags bunched under every table. Columns of smoke rose from parked cigarettes, and all around us was the babble of female voices, like waves clattering on shingle.

Aunty Barbara had a black coffee while I ate a slab of cherry cheesecake. ‘I'm off dairy products,' she said, and then proceeded to poach forkfuls from my plate. If she hadn't paid for it in the first place I would have been tempted to fend off these incursions. Left to myself I could have savoured it for hours, but now that we were in competition I had to rush.

After lunch we looked at shoes, but without trying any on. Aunty Barbara couldn't be bothered to keep unzipping
her boots, and besides she had atrocious feet, she said. Ruined by ballet.

A sign for the toy department reminded her that it was Donovan we had come for. She browsed the shelves helplessly, without a clue what he might like, whereas I could see immediately half a dozen things that would have been perfect. The pogo stick, indoor croquet set and stilts were ruled out by
Aunty Barbara as being too unwieldy to take on the bus. In the end she settled on a crash helmet and elbow and knee pads to compliment the phantom skateboard. ‘I just hope Alan hasn't forgotten, or changed his mind,' she muttered, as another cheque was torn off its stub.

Now that lunch was over and I had my present I was starting to weary of shopping, and Aunty Barbara's boots were pinching, so we made our way onto the high street in search of the bus stop. I had just spotted it in the distance and was quickening my pace when Aunty Barbara noticed a branch of Boots opposite and told me to wait outside with the baggage while she made a few last-minute purchases. ‘I can't take all this clobber in with me,' she said, divesting herself of bags. ‘It'll hold me up.'

I stood on the pavement, guarding our purchases, my monogrammed box safely under one arm. I felt a twinge of anxiety at the thought of Mum's reaction to the peach satin dress. She was not the sort to go into raptures over pretty things. As for the price tag, I wondered whether I might be able to remove it before we reached home. If Mum saw it she would be bound to invoke the shades of the Less Fortunate, and I didn't want those wraiths clutching at my satin hem, staring up at me with their hungry eyes, when I was trying to feel like a princess.

Aunty Barbara came out of Boots at a brisk walk and set off up the road, gesturing to me to follow. She was holding her gerbil coat together oddly, as though she had stomach ache.

‘That's the wrong way,' I protested, struggling to gather up the bags. ‘We need to cross back over.'

‘Never mind,' she said over her shoulder. ‘Just keep walking.' And she quickened her pace so that I had to run to catch up. In spite of her high heels and atrocious feet she could certainly step on it when required. I drew level with her just as our bus hove into view on the opposite side of the road.

‘That's ours,' I said, and she grabbed my wrist with her free arm and we plunged through a gap in the traffic.

As we reached the kerb she caught her heel in the drain and stumbled, and from between the flaps of her coat slithered half a dozen packets of tights – fifteen denier, medium, mink – five packets of emery boards, six tubes of mascara and more eyeliner pencils than I could count. I'd never seen anyone buy so much of the same thing: you'd think she was stocking up for the rest of her life.

‘They could have given you a bag,' I said indignantly, as I helped her to shovel it all in with Donovan's crash helmet and pads. ‘How do they expect you to carry all this loose stuff?'

But Aunty Barbara didn't answer. She was inspecting the skinned heel of her boot. ‘Serve me bloody well right,' she muttered. When she stood up I noticed she had grazed her knee and now had a huge hole and a racing ladder in her tights. Still, she had plenty of spares, I thought.

Some of the onlookers at the bus stop, seeing our
struggles, had held up the driver. The crowd parted to let us through, and Aunty Barbara gave them a regal smile as she climbed aboard and hobbled with great dignity down the aisle on her broken heel.

THE PEACH DRESS
had a better reception than I could have hoped for. Mum did not confiscate it or cut it up to make quilts for earthquake victims. Instead she said, ‘Oh, Barbara, you shouldn't have,' and to me, ‘Well, aren't you a lucky girl.'

Later that evening I put it on to show Dad when he came home from the prison, and he pretended not to recognise me. ‘Good evening, madam,' he said, bowing slightly. ‘Have you seen my daughter? She's about your height, but wild and scruffy-looking.' Mum smiled at this, though she couldn't do teasing herself. It was just the three of us. Aunty Barbara was having a lie-down on her bed and the boys were still out at the driving range, collecting up the golf balls for ten pence a bucket.

‘Typical Barbara,' Mum said, shaking her head. ‘Spending a fortune she hasn't got on something so frivolous.'

‘The poor are always with us,' Dad reminded her.