Qinmeartha and the Girl-Child LoChi

2: Girl-Child LoChi

It would be Easter in a couple of weeks.

Joanna had had a good drive down from London, and was feeling relaxed rather than tired by it. Slowing down as she came in off the A38 onto Fleet Street – the road that led into Ashburton's centre from the east – for the first time she wondered how much of what had happened in the past six months she could tell Aunt Jill, how much would have to be censored.
Quite a lot,
she concluded.
There are some things that don't cross the generation gap, however much Aunt Jill is supposed to have been a bit of a goer in her young days.

She parked the red Mini in Ham's Lane, just in front of the Crafts Centre, as usual. Climbing out of it, she looked up at the windows of her aunt's flat, just above the Blue Horse. They were blank, like eyelids closed against the sunshine. Aunt Jill would be watching her from there, so she waved cheerfully, then dived into the back seat to fetch out her squashy grey bagful of clothes.

Greta appeared at the door of the Crafts Centre, smiling uncertainly. She was of middle age and looked it, despite a lifetime spent eating nothing that came out of a packet or tin. She claimed to cook everything served in the Crafts Centre from raw materials, no shortcuts, but her neat blue designer apron never seemed to show any food-stains.

"Hi," said Joanna.

"Hello," said Greta slowly. "You'll have come to see your aunt again?"

"Yes," Joanna said. It was an obvious question, and for a second it worried her. Greta wasn't exactly a conversational expert, but she wasn't usually as dim as this either. "It's been a while."

"Been a while," Greta echoed. She turned and went back into her shop.

Joanna hefted the bag onto her shoulder and crossed the road. The Blue Horse was open, even though it was the middle of the afternoon – Jas must have decided the grockle season had begun – and Joanna was briefly tempted to push her way in through the swing doors to the cool, friendly darkness. No – Aunt Jill must have seen her arrive. Later on, perhaps, Joanna would be able to drag her out of the flat for a drink or three.

The flat's entrance was through a concrete corridor and up a little flight of stairs at the back. Listening to the bell's ping-
pong
, Joanna saw that the tiny garden was a mess, with weeds already growing in a tangled mat across the earth. She frowned. Aunt Jill wasn't an enthusiastic gardener, but she was determinedly dutiful. Had she been ill sometime during the winter, and not said anything – not wanted to bother Joanna? It would have been like her.

Ping-
pong
again.

Not that Joanna could have done much about it, even if Aunt Jill had told her. There had been too much going on in London, too many emotional quagmires that had to be either navigated or circumnavigated. The things she wasn't going to be able to talk to Aunt Jill about.

The symmetry of the situation struck her as she stood waiting on the doorstep. When last she'd been here in Ashburton she'd been aware that there was something Aunt Jill was withholding from her. Now it was the other way around. Splitting up with Mike – well, that would be OK: Aunt Jill had shown something akin to impatience when Joanna's relationship with Mike had entered its third year, as if Aunt Jill herself, in her youth, would have ditched the man months before, just on principle. Yeah, and it'd be all right to talk about Peter, too – about most of it.

Ping-
pong
.

How long had she been standing here? Couldn't be more than a couple of minutes. Maybe Aunt Jill had gone to the loo after seeing her arrive.
Don't worry about things so much,
thought Joanna, pulling a battered pack of cigarettes from her handbag.
You're getting to be as bad as Aunt Jill. A fussbudget, Peter would call you ...

Yes, it'd been a bit of a mess with Peter, hadn't it? Three years of Mike had reduced everything to familiarity. Peter had seemed a good option – although, when Joanna thought about it, she realized angrily that a lot of what had made him seem so glamorous was just that he had a faster car. They'd driven north one day, up almost as far as Manchester, and in between being terrified of police speed-traps Joanna had felt as if she were throwing off the shackles of her staid, quasi-respectable relationship with Mike.

Peter had driven away very quickly indeed when she'd told him she was pregnant.

Ping-
pong
.

And the odd thing was, she'd hardly blamed him.

"Joanna, darling," said a voice at her elbow.

She turned to find the door had opened. A pale face looked at her out of the gloom.

"Aunt Jill?" she said hesitantly.

"Who else would it be?"

"Yes, but ..."

"I've lost a little weight since you were last here, that's all. Come in, child, come in. Don't just hang around there. There's a chilly draught, if you hadn't noticed."

Following Aunt Jill up the inside stairs, Joanna found her mind in a turmoil. If she'd met her aunt in the street she wouldn't have recognized her. Aunt Jill couldn't be more than half the weight she'd been last October, and she seemed twenty years older. This was somebody's grandmother who was pointing her into the drawing-room – somebody's rather old and decrepit grandmother.

"Aunt Jill," Joanna began helplessly, "you look so ..."

"So
what
?" There was still a strong light in the blue eye that peered up at her.

"So ...
changed
," said Joanna.

"I'm six months older, that's all." Aunt Jill settled herself into the yellow armchair, leaving Joanna to sort herself out however she would. "It's been a long six months. I don't suppose you've had too much time to think about your poor old aunt – not with all the things you young folk get up to in the city."

"I'm sorry it's been so long ..."

"No, don't apologize to me, Joanna." Aunt Jill waved a frail hand in dismissal. The skin between the fingers was pale-yellow parchment. "I was young, too, you keep forgetting. A long time ago."

"Not all that long," said Joanna brusquely, dropping the squashy bag and plonking herself down in the window seat. "You're not all
that
ancient, Aunt Jill."
But she
looks
it. She looks as if she's not far from the grave. She doesn't look sixty ... sixty-three, I think ... or is it -four?

"Long enough. Tea? You'll have to make it for us both, if you could. I seem to have been standing half the day."

Joanna put the kettle on, scuttled upstairs briefly to the loo, then filled the pot. The kitchen, normally as neat as one of those pictures in the colour supplements, was like the garden out the back: it gave the impression of being overgrown.

"What was Peter like, then?" said Aunt Jill as Joanna came back into the room, carrying the tray. "You never told me much about him on the phone."

She didn't sound very concerned. In fact, she sounded as if she were finding it an effort to formulate the words, like an actress suddenly thrust into a part without having been given the script, just told to muddle along as best she can.

"Not much to tell," said Joanna. And there wasn't. He had been fun to be with, but now it was an effort to conjure up even the image of his face or the sound of his laughter. Their brief fling had been somehow affectless, even at the time. And then, of course, he'd been abruptly out of her life – business had suddenly, by some astonishing coincidence, necessitated his departure to Glasgow for the next two years.

Leaving her, and a fetus developing inside her. And Mike – except Mike hadn't really come into it. Oh, he'd been
there
, of course: hanging around like a faithful spaniel, over-eager that they remain best friends, even though they were no longer lovers.

She hadn't had the heart to tell him that the child was his: he might have offered, in his gallant way, to marry her, or something embarrassing and
confining
like that. So instead she'd quietly arranged for an abortion.

She'd been surprised by how much of an argument the doctors and nurses had put up, pointing out that an abortion was a permanent thing: you couldn't change your mind about it afterwards. And then she'd been surprised by how completely they'd acquiesced as soon as they'd realized that her mind was set. She got the feeling that, even if she'd had second thoughts an hour before the op, they'd have been overridden by those now-impersonal persons.

The biggest surprise was the guilt, afterwards. It was as if it was only after the bond between them had been severed that she could start to recognize the fetus – the dead fetus, which she wasn't allowed to see – as a fellow human being. She didn't think of herself as a murderess, not quite; but she did have the haunting sensation, whenever she woke in the night, that perhaps she'd run someone over in the car and forgotten about it. Which was illogical, silly, a notion not to be entertained. But a notion which, alas, had gate-crashed, and showed no signs of departure.

Joanna didn't respond to her aunt's question. The
old
Aunt Jill would have seen her preoccupation, but the new one – this grandmother – didn't even seem to be interested.

"I had a good drive down," said Joanna. "The countryside always looks so gorgeous this time of the ..."

"You're looked after in my will," said Aunt Jill. "As you must have known you'd be. Say no more about it, now. Just so long as you know."

"Auntie!" She'd left the sugar in the kitchen. "Whatever brought that up?"

"I'm not as young as I used to was."

"You're not
old
."

"Amn't I?"

Looking at the pale face, with the bones of the cheek and jaw clearly demarcated beneath the wrinkled paper skin, Joanna could find no answer. Yes, whatever had happened in this past half-year, Aunt Jill was now indisputably old. No argument.

"I'll get the sugar," she said.

"As you wish, child." This time the arm on the worn yellow chair only half-rose, leaving the little dismissive wave uncompleted.

When Joanna located the sugar-lumps, tucked away near the back of the cupboard for the cleaning powders and washing-up liquid, she found they were stained and spotted with what she hoped was just old tea. On the spur of the moment she dumped them in the overflowing pedal bin.

"You're out of sugar," she said, back in the drawing-room. "I'll get some for you, later."

"Oh, don't worry about `later'. Tell me something about what's been going on."

A little of the vitality had returned to the old woman. She'd pulled herself more upright in the chair, and was drinking her tea black and sugarless.

"Well, they sacked me." When Joanna had first told her aunt on the phone there had been a shocked sucking-in of breath: in the old days people never got sacked unless it was for some gross breach of conduct. "They called it making me redundant, but it felt just the same as being sacked."

She'd been working for a publishing company, Rolfe and Baldwin. Mainly they published glossy novels with lots of sex in different countries that sold hardly at all in hardback but gained big paperback advances. Joanna had been an assistant editor for nearly five years, all the time telling herself that she was wasting her time – that sooner or later the
right
job would turn up at OUP or somewhere respectable, and then she'd be on her way. Instead, as Dave Rolfe had told her, the bottom had fallen out of the soft-porn market, and they were having to cut back. She'd got six months' salary and a big bunch of red roses.

"Well," said Aunt Jill, "you were never very happy there anyway. Not a great loss."

All at once Joanna felt an upsurge of fury. The last few months had been hell – Mike, Peter, the abortion, the redundancy, everything – and surely it was her entitlement to have some older person she could lean on, someone whose shoulder she could weep into, just like she'd wept into her mother's shoulder as a child. For almost a decade Aunt Jill had been that person: it was her
job
to be a sort of mother confessor, and she was failing to fulfil it just at the time Joanna most needed her to.

I should be sympathetic,
she told herself sternly.
I shouldn't be thinking about my own interests at all. I shouldn't be being so selfish. Aunt Jill's ill – she must be, and here am I worrying away about my own trivial concerns.

It was good advice, but the anger didn't go away. She watched her hand clenching on her knee.

"I'll go and make up my bed," she said. "And then I'll do some shopping. And clean the kitchen. You've been letting things get out of hand, I think. Have you seen a doctor?"

Aunt Jill produced a thin imitation of a snort.

"Doctor Grasmere? He gave me a prescription. The same prescription he gave me last year for my rheumatism. I think it's a special sort of medicine that's designed to make old biddies go away and stop pestering him."

It was the nearest to the old Aunt Jill that Joanna had seen since arriving here. She looked for the smile that should have accompanied the remark, but it wasn't there.

"I'll go and make up my bed," she repeated.

~

Aunt Jill was too tired to go out for a drink that evening – too tired to do anything much except keep her feet up in front of the television, not even clucking over the usual dreadful news about rioting in South Africa and further slaughter in Bosnia. Joanna, who had done some shopping, cleaned the worst of the kitchen and concocted a casserole to throw in the oven – all in a state of righteous fury – had no choice in the matter: she
needed
the drink, not for its own sake but just to get away from the funereal flat and its morbid occupant.

It's like the baby all over again,
she thought as she clattered too noisily down the stairs.
I'm already beginning to think of Aunt Jill as someone completely isolated from me, rather than just ... Aunt Jill.

The Blue Horse smelt of stale cigarette smoke and spilt beer, just the way it always did – but there the semblance of normality ended. It wasn't ever a
noisy
pub – not like the Customs House in Fleet Street, where the yobboes with bikes and leather jackets hung out – but this evening it was almost silent, as if the air were too thick to carry sound. The lights – fake gas-lamps that Jas had put in to replace the fluorescents his predecessor had installed – likewise seemed muted. There were a few other drinkers already there, one or two of whom she recognized enough to exchange nods with, but only Jas himself had any words for her.