On and off through the years, by Otterwells alive and kicking as well as by Otterwells tucked away in the family graveyard, the scandal of Great-Aunt Fanny had been mulled over with conscious dispassion, and repeatedly put aside like a tricky crossword. There was, anyway, always happening, in this or that Otterwell-dominated part of Tasmania, another Otterwell wedding, birth, or birthday. Or Lent began or school holidays or shearing or a vice-regal visit or the racing season or war or…well, tedious external things. No one alive seemed sure how Fanny’s prolonged sojourn in foreign territory had started: she herself divulged nothing, but a tattered rumour inclined to some necessary patriotic gesture during the 1914–1918 War. Aunt Ann, being Aunt Ann, had other ideas—unpleasant ones, suggestive of hanky-panky, and diplomatically disregarded. Great-Aunt’s legendary predicament was a subject as engaging as a pet tortoise; it often came out, like a snail, at night. It withdrew, pronto, at the merest squeak of new christenings, courtships, or tonsillectomies. Finally, however, explosively out of the blue, Uncle Eustace pronounced a decision: he himself would fetch her back.
In the family, Uncle Eustace was famed and feared for this nineteenth-century forcefulness, this taking-the-bull-by-the-horns Chinese Gordon resolution, as much as he was renowned for being the one Otterwell bachelor, not only for his period but for as far back as records were known. The probity of his bachelordom, with no heart-of-gold barmaid kept in a Battery Point love nest, and certainly no one or nothing else more dubious kept anywhere, added a dignifying halo to the eccentricity of wifelessness. Who knew what forces galore, untapped by wife, child, hidden sorrow, poverty, or unmentionable vice, still occupied him? For example, at seventy-three, he had just given up Royal Tennis.
On Christmas Eve 1960, after performing a Father Christmas as terrifying as Lear, and while reviving himself with Courvoisier, he czarishly shouted them all…even Uncle Hereward who always fidgeted whether to take an umbrella or not, blazing or pouring…into believing that they had inclemently abandoned Great-Aunt Fanny ‘among who knows whom,’ Eustace blared Ezekielly, ‘among tradespeople, shepherds, mercer’s counter-jumpers, journalists! And exactly where, who knows, eh? Forty years! A disgrace to us all. While Fergus was alive it was wise to keep mum, eh? But he’s been dead for twelve years. Best leave it to me, eh? Pour me another, Varley. Leave’t to me, eh?’
‘Yes, oh yes, Eustace,’ they heard themselves cravenly pipe, and would have crossed themselves had they been one of those. Eustace was an alarming not-to-be-denied Pied Piper once he got going. They all quickly had another drink. After all, it was Christmas too.
By Candlemas, Uncle Eustace, in Isle of Butte tweeds, point-to-point cap, and pelargonium buttonhole, face pink as sporting paper or baby’s, had dominated, sniffling rather and headachy, Fanny’s uprooting. It was a chilly day, miles from anywhere respectable. Trees dripped on him as though he were a postman. Her nearest neighbour was a politician with a scruffy Socialist past. She should never, of course, have spent all those years there. She should have been with the family. With the family she would be. Reluctantly, he had to leave her, at the railway station, to travel on, poor lady, in the care of a man with a suspect accent, to Campbell Town where Uncle Eustace proposed to catch up with her next day.
The next day he was unable to keep his appointment because of what he savagely called a summer cold. This so swiftly galloped into danger that on St Valentine’s Day he nearly died.
‘Completely dying would, in the circumstances, have been absolutely killing,’ said Gwendoline, young Mrs Ian Otterwell, who concealed a marshmallow heart under a shocker’s exterior.
‘And needlessly ironic,’ said Aunt Ann, fingering her cameo as though she’d said nothing at all.
Not until Whitsunday was he finally out of bath chairs, and his knees out from under afghans, and he fit and pink and loud enough to ask about Great-Aunt Fanny. Silence fell. Time dropped a number of stitches. He asked again, more loudly. Evasion was tried: Hereward offered a cigar. Evasion and cigar were roared at. ‘But…’ they all began chattering at the same time, disobedient children botching justification, ‘but Eustace dear, but old boy, but Uncle, while you were so very, very…’
In listening to the dangerous wind keening around Eustace, in listening to the wind that never stopped flowing through the garden of Otterwells, tugging off a leaf, a branch, a heart, a life, they had, one and all, utterly forgotten to keep an eye on Great-Aunt Fanny’s move.
Not saying they were but unmistakably considering them ninnies, he next day drove fifty-odd miles to see if Fanny were settled in her proper place.
While everybody was telephoning everybody else, there he was, in the family graveyard with its own century-old chapel, peering and poking about, getting cemetery mud on his brogues, trouser cuffs and knees. He returned to the car with the ominous stride of Alexander the Great. He drove back as recklessly as a joy-riding hot-rodder, and held the floor.
The billiard-table-sized Welsh slate slabs roofing the vault, in which Fanny should long ago have circumspectly been, seemed not, he thought, to have been recently moved. She’d certainly—he’d seen to that, eh?—been got out of that other wretched cemetery. Perhaps…per-h-a-p-s…he further thought…moss in the crevices could have been recently disturbed, could indeed have been replaced with a species of commercial piety. But he’d forgotten to take his spectacles; autumn leaves and a Scotch mist had made pure decision difficult. Curse that summer cold!
A telephone call to the undertaker’s revealed that he of odd accent, who had been in charge of Fanny’s digging-up, train trip and reinterment, had been a short-time employee since returned to Australia. A Mainlander! Eustace gave a terrible shout, and crashed down the receiver. The earth, that great globe, winced. Varley dropped a sugar bowl, fortunately silver. A Mainlander!…someone from…Carlton was it, eh? Woolloomooloo?
Swiftly as a Terrytoon vegetable, suspicion put on buds, leaves, dire flowers. Uncle Eustace became taller than Abraham Lincoln, and noisier: ‘The fellow’s a jackanapes. Mortician he calls himself. An employer of criminals. Dabbling in cremation like a blasted Hindu, the silly ass. Phonograph music and foam-rubber lilies! Coffins of xylonite…plastic…whatever the muck is, I suppose, eh? Mortician! Right from the jump I was against his joining the Club. He’s like the barber’s cat: all…’
‘Eustace!’ snapped Aunt Ann. ‘There are gentlemen present.’ She had been a maidenly suffragette with, nevertheless, ears.
In the next few days Eustace occupied himself Napoleonically, very much head-of-the-family, with the minutiae of a grandiose plan. He wrote fiats to everyone, each succinct sentence brutally clear, too specific, too personal to be misunderstood or fobbed off. Intimations of excommunication glittered so ferociously between the lines of his old man’s virile copperplate that newer Otterwell wives, the just-read command on Spicer’s Deckle still between their fingertips, switched off spin driers or forsook semi-built Constance Spry flower arrangements, and sped in M.G.s to buy trowels or whatever they were. Otterwell telephones were rung, and rang, constantly. Who, my God, last had the crow-bar from the potting shed of the old Sandy Bay place? What the hell was a mattock? Listen, dear, Varley says we’ll be expected to picnic, so if you do a double lot of your divine little scones with Gentlemen’s Relish, I’ll do a double of my special Madeleines and we’ll interfeed…
No one cared to let the side down; no one dared scamp Uncle Eustace’s mandates.
On the selected Sunday, from every part of Tasmania, cars packed with tools, food, wicker-clad thermos flasks, children, and their Otterwell parents and relations, moved towards the graveyard. Wound up like a clock, generations ago, the family ethos was so well-oiled, had ticked so surely and sturdily for so long, that it would have been useless as well as traitorous for any member to suggest I should like to be otherwise, someone else, or elsewhere today, as useless as saying I should like to be an echidna or called Marco Polo. From faith and habit, non-Otterwells seemed to them as eels must to eagles, however glossy and silver-plated the eel, however like fractured sunshade the eagle. Sheer lunacy this plan of Eustace’s, they might think, but ratifiable Otterwell lunacy. We’re all in it. So, by ten o’clock, everyone punctual, from Melton Mowbray, St Helen’s, Westbury, Huonville, Oatlands, New Norfolk, everywhere, everyone had arrived. It was an autumn day, exquisite for any outing, perfection for one of this nature: nowhere are sunshine, birds, breezes, weeds, more subtly exhilarating to the senses and conceit of the living than in a graveyard.
Fecundity was the first impression—children everywhere; their knowingly uninhabited ink-blue, dead-still Otterwell eyes spotted the air. There seemed double the actual children, for each child had accompanied its own Sunday-go-graveyard self as one extra child simmering unseen to be barbaric and crazed, to flash diabolically aflame past the corner of adult consciousnesses; but, the time early and the occasion touchy, they discreetly simulated severe charm and, speechlessly as nursery rhyme characters on kindergarten friezes, carried buckets, rakes and Dutch hoes. With their tweedy aunts, with wavering aunts, champagne-bottle-legged golfing aunts, tittuping aunts and Burne-Jones aunts, they advanced towards and grouped themselves below Uncle Eustace who had mounted, civic-statue-like, the top of the vault to which, in an orderliness obscured by gorse, periwinkle and pre-Raphaelite Austrian Copper briers, other Otterwell graves lined up.
Even Aunt Ann, inclined to perpetual fractiousness, was momentarily halcyon in the group which, standing mutely as waxworks, chins uplifted, listened to Uncle Eustace. Only the oldest aunt, Aunt Beatrice, sat. She sat in a camp chair, centrally front, her bone fingers burdened with diamonds and rubies. The crowd, accidentally dramatic, of overlapping generations had the impermanent coherence of a combination in whose each mind, as much as in the corporate one, lay no mental reservation like a segment of decaying trevally. At least, on this occasion. First of all, beneath their soles lay the boxed scraps of their own dead. Second, many of their houses had once been these dead’s, or contained objects wherein the grimaces or half-smiles of the dead still lingered—in Wainewright portraits, darkening looking-glasses, on the bumlike curves of silver rose-bowls, in photograph albums containing pressed pansies picked last century by fingers that, then, could write Otterwell on a will or a love letter. Third, Great-Aunt Fanny, so long a sherry-party joke, now claimed by right of blood this protective picnic, this family prying into her gothic contretemps. Was she here, now, below, in her destined niche, filed for reference on the Last Day? That is what the family, through Uncle Eustace, hoped and had jolly well paid for. Or had the Mainland ghoul, obviously with a face caddish as a monkey’s, done something too nasty to think of but nevertheless thought of…a council rubbish-tip? a lake bed? a stinky fire in a Midlands’ gully once lair for convict bushrangers?
As they listened to Uncle Eustace avoid putting these outraging possibilities into words, they stared remorselessly at him, their thoughts sprinkling salty glints of anger in their eyes. He, too, began to glint—but he was rebuking them. ‘Moreover,’ he was saying, ‘moreover, the graveyard, our graveyard, the Otterwell graveyard…’ He was rubbing it in. ‘…is in a shocking state. Eh? As you can see.’ As they could see. ‘Our own people! We are to blame. We! We!’ They were to blame. ‘That’s why I wrote you all to come prepared to clean up while the vault is investigated. Except, of course, Aunt Beatrice.’ Aunt Beatrice lifted an ancient jewel-knobbed hand with queenly deprecation. Everyone looked at her as at an unbelievable idol but with sufficient affectionate respect. ‘There are,’ continued Uncle Eustace, ‘enough of us, God knows—eh? In my letters you were each allotted a certain task in a certain section. It took some planning.’ He paused. He stopped pausing, and made a dangerous remark: ‘Any questions?’
Before Aunt Ann could uncurl—he knew his danger—he side-stepped quickly, side-stepped imperatively: ‘Good—no questions. Charles, you have the crow-bars? Mattock, Greg? Pickaxe? Bill-hook? Mallet? Bamboo rakes…Grace? Varley? Ah, I see you’ve a trowel, Young Christopher!’ Everyone had brought everything asked for, and held them up: sans-culottes preparing to march on the Tuileries. Everyone except…and Uncle Eustace’s eyes narrowed…‘Your secateurs, Ann?’ Aunt Ann’s German secateurs were famous. She had not brought them. She tossed her head; no angel, she did not fear treading. Her little indigo eyes also narrowed, and flashed wickedly. Level-toned yet sharp, she said, ‘I have brought Fanny’s own silver teapot. I felt it fitting.’
To everyone’s surprise, Aunt Beatrice said, almost cried as loudly as someone younger, ‘No!’ What could she mean? Her old mind wandering, off and away?
Aunt Ann stuck out her chin, whiskery as an as-yet-unshaved youth’s, at Eustace. It was a mutinous gesture. Uncle Eustace clenched a fist.
‘An unseemly disturbance is imminent,’ whispered twelve-year-old Young Christopher who was wicked, sophisticated, and far too handsome. His cousins sycophantically giggled, ‘Fie! So early in the day. And before us innocent innocents. Oh, fie!’
Then Grace, lanky gentle Grace, said gently, ‘Aunt Ann asked me to bring our secateurs, Eustace,’ and she held them up, high, at the end of her long long long arm, like a symbolic Communist. There secateurs were. Uncle Eustace laughed—oh, quickly and fruitily as a prime minister. ‘To work!’ he shouted, semaphoring meaninglessly. ‘To your posts! To work!’
In a geyser of released conversation, of greetings, of hullabaloo and movement, children bursting like grenades from between adults, the group milled and crumbled and scattered. To work all the women went except old Aunt Beatrice whose lilac-coloured chiffon scarf was rearranged, one after another, by five women. To work all the children seemed to go except the youngest twins with silkworm silk hair who ran about clutching their flies, and squealing, ‘We are to blame. We! We! Wee-wee. Pee-wee. Wee-pee. We pee. We poo. We poo-poo!’ Their stately Labrador, its severe head like an heraldic profile or one from an old walkingstick handle, lumbered woodenly as a rocking horse between them. A surfeit of forbidden things to do had lashed them to exaltation.
While the women, garden-gloved or gloveless, worked on paths, headstones, urns, broken columns, sandstone scrolls, granite tombs and cast-iron railings, their unfettered, faultless voices called in the sunlight above the buried, tongueless skulls.
‘My dear, how very kind of Eustace to put me on Digby’s grave—I shouldn’t admit it with his age so clearly stated, but we were childhood sweethearts. Though he once stole my agate marbles.’
‘This rose bush must be a cutting from the big Maman Cochet at The Grange.’
‘Shall I scrape all this moss away? It looks so fitting and darling. Or just leave aesthetic enough, like the Japanese?’
‘I wish I’d brought my old steel kitchen knife. Men don’t know about steel kitchen knives.’
‘What did James Frederick really die of?’
‘I,’ said Aunt Ann, ‘shall not pretend that I am at all surprised, but Eustace has allotted me the prickliest grave.’
Although these statements seemed merely the trite ones of feckless humans, and utterable by anyone with a tongue, they revealed that the speakers had preserved, throughout their own vicissitudes and those of the world they had been born into, viewpoints and moralities as much of their class as their accents were, and their children. These creatures, in constant motion, had seemingly much multiplied, separating themselves from themselves as amoebae do. They mafficked about with the alacrity of vandals to whom no vandalism was that day permissible. Some, for a while, browbeatenly scratched lichen from headstones, or permitted themselves to be hectored into carrying off pruned brier suckers and Great Mullein stalks. Otherwise they roamed restlessly outside the cage of adult duty, hampered by miles of undulating paddocks and the obvious infinity of a cloudless sky. Aunt Ann kept on capturing some of them with her fish-hook eye and, as other aunts did, mistaking them for their siblings or cousins. Were they, she asked, street arabs or swineherd’s waifs crept in through the may hedge? This was surely cryptic humour on her part. Yet, even to aunts and uncles less whimsical than Aunt Ann, there appeared more of these youngsters, who no longer wore sailor suits and knew of The Windsor Magazine, than seemed reasonable. The gold-mopped twins, for example, had become a sextuplet, banshee-shrieking by with attendant Cerberus.
Meantime, ponderously and sonorously and warily, the men confronted the paramount mystery of Great-Aunt Fanny. Dedicated and daylight Burkes and Hares, they assessed the vault covering. Under their off-hand dandyism and leather-patched sports coats was the muscular and maternal brutishness of those who worked with animals and their neuroses and needs, and who fought into submission, just as their women in labour fought necessary pain into submission, the seasons and the earth. These Otterwell males, or males chosen as sires by Otterwell women, had weathered youth, injudicious passions, disillusion, the whims of weather, scandals, and boils on the backside, with concealed and tenderized arrogance. Their manners were perfect, and would have remained so while they killed an enemy or stopped a crucifixion. Tenderly their huge hands and shrewd eyes examined the tomb; tenderly they prodded crevices with crow-bars and pick-axes, inviting each other’s suggestions to poo-hoo them, before attacking like convinced burglars the vault slabs. With vigour and precision they made the first attempts at prising. These failed. Swearing began. Those who did not smoke pipes offered each other cigarettes, saying, ‘Christ, eh! She’s going to be bloody tougher than we thought. Christ!’
Young Christopher was, of course, in earshot. He possessed a special sense.
‘They are blaspheming,’ he said to his entourage of underling cousins.
‘They are blaspheming,’ echoed the myrmidons and, giggling from trying not to giggle, held hands over mouths, and stuck out their round bellies farther, and rolled inky eyes.
‘They are corrupting influences,’ Young Christopher continued. ‘They are immoral fiends and wicked monsters. We must inform the sheriff! Yippee!’ And he galloped off, being, centaurlike, horse and rider; and the smaller centaurs galloped at his pace after him, caracoling like a posse of goodies behind him, and shrilling like Comanches around the church.
The men made a scarecrow of a marble angel with their coats and, thus coatlessly defiant, attacked the slabs again.
Presently, for Otterwell women were deft, most of them had fulfilled Uncle Eustace’s behests. On the other side of a raffish rosemary hedge was a handful of humbler graves, not Otterwell. Gwendoline, forthrightly why-notting and dammit-all-let’s-do-the-decent-thinging, persuaded others less forthright and more dubious, but amenable to sentimental platitude disguised as decisiveness, to work with her on these alien plots.
With less intensity of feeling they idly toiled, as at an inferior charity, and were so toiling, and placidly deep in obstetrical legend, when a shadow they immediately knew was monitory fell upon their bowed backs, and a fluting astounded voice said:
‘Those graves are not ours!’
It was Varley, intellectual and perfectionist (her rose garden was a miracle, so were her potted shrimps; she read Elizabeth Bowen), who had just restored Edwin Otterwell’s grave almost to the condition it was in 1863 when he had died under a runaway barouche.
‘What the hell does it matter, Varley?’ said Gwendoline in a contemporary way, softish but boldish, from her kneeling pad. She pushed back a lock of hair to stress barefacedness. ‘Dammit, let’s be decent!’
‘Need you swear?’ said Varley, who really didn’t mind a scrap. ‘I don’t think we should interfere.’
‘With the dead?’ said Gwendoline, lighting a suave cigarette.
Varley was not to be caught. She too lit a cigarette—slowly—and blew out—slowly—a vampish cone of smoke.
‘With the dead of others. The dead do not belong to themselves. Graves belong to others. Those others should tend them with love. They are not ours. Your work, however worthy, is…is municipal. There is no love.’
‘Bosh!’ said Gwendoline and, to show unabashment, ‘Dammit, Varley!’ Young Christopher would have cherished this but was being immaculately vile elsewhere. All the children were. The twins and their dog, because they had been forbidden the road, were on the road terrifying a rustic bodgie passer-by who had intended terrifying them.
Gwendoline spoke again: ‘Oh, double bosh, Varley!’ for Varley, towering, had fixed her with a navy-blue look.
Varley said, ‘Be that as it may. Gwendoline, you’ve laddered your stocking—left leg.’
Gwendoline said, ‘Damn and blast!’
Women said, ‘Spit, dear.’
Who said, ‘Surely Varley,’ yanking out a thistle belonging to an unloved non-Otterwell, ‘surely it’s easy to love humanity when it isn’t there?’
It sounded a Brontë-ish remark but came, naturally, from Aunt Ann whose magnanimities even had always a dash of vinegar. Varley, who had once published at her own expense a book of poems (Roses of Silence and Solitude), looked away, mysteriously as a poetess vouchsafing nothing, and walked away thinking something nicer.
Nearby aunts, older, some, finding it time to suggest to themselves starting a headache as reason for luncheon but mainly cups of tea, drew from their pockets noon-showing enamelled watches they had had since black moiré butterfly bows tied back their then-thick-and-coloured hair.
Varley, drifting, saw in the distance, frailly royal under the big Cedar of Lebanon, Aunt Beatrice. Old old aunt, time-shrivelled aunt, had long ago, restless and fretful, left her camp chair. With a trailing totter, she had moved from group to group in her Queen Alexandra manner—the painted and thickly powdered face also; the gracious word dropped vaguely here and there. Yet she seemed touched by the wind of an intangible bitterness, to be seeking wearily, seeking and seeking. Now that the vault was full—or would soon, they hoped, be proved to be, for Great-Aunt Fanny had been destined for the last unoccupied niche—perhaps Aunt Beatrice, long the widow of a husband buried at sea, sought a place for herself. She tacked; she contemplated spaces; she tacked again. Certainly, certainly, when next the family gathered she would be underground, bereft of her far too many wonderful old-fashioned rings, of her paint, of her Arabian nimbus of scent, even of her scant flesh. Underground where? Oh, where? She had entered the blue shadows of the cedar, uninterested in the housewifely kneeling, the trowelling and grating and hacking and snipping, the chattering, the bonfire the children were prodding into smoke a paler blue than the cedar shadows. ‘Joffre Blue,’ she whispered. It was a colour of her middle years. Tears suggested themselves to her. ‘Joffre Blue,’ she was whispering when Varley arrived. ‘Fanny spilt Indian ink on my Joffre Blue blouse with the pearl buttons.’
Using a handkerchief almost all lace she blotted a shallow tear before it furrowed her powder.
‘Why, Aunt Beatrice…’ said Varley, coming into the shadow. ‘Darling, why not come and sit down again? Or should you like to be in the car? Luncheon’ll be soon.’
Old Aunt Beatrice looked haggard above her chiffon pussycat bow of scarf. She spoke with querulous wildness:
‘I don’t want to be buried outside. It’s too noisy. Grasshoppers. Omnibuses going past to Hobart. And too much light.’ Varley knew that she sat always with her back to it, the blinds three-quarter-down. ‘I want to be in the vault. With grandmother and mama and Alexander and Galamiel. Fanny always grabbed everything. She spilt ink on my blouse. She gave my lovely scrap-book to the Orphans’ Home. Without permission. She’s in the vault. It’s not fair. She doesn’t care. Look where she got herself buried the first time…’
Varley was becoming horrified when there was a great calling-out and waving from the men: ‘It’s open! It’s open! We’ve opened the vault!’
Varley looked Come on, Aunt Beatrice and held out a hand. ‘Leave me here,’ said the ravaged old woman in the cold shadow. ‘Leave me. I don’t want to see…’ She did not say Fanny but grew infinitely fragile.
Varley did not know what to do, and felt larger than a land-girl.
‘Go away,’ said Aunt Beatrice, waspish. ‘Go away and leave me, mean selfish Fanny,’ said the old woman to Varley.
Within minutes, all of them, husbands, wives, aunts, uncles, children, twins and dog, cynical Young Christopher, flushed Varley, were at the vault.
What ultimately and most and for years impressed the adults was that the name-plates on the coffins were completely untarnished, as though they’d been done with Goddard’s Plate Powder the day before; this despite the fact that six inches of strange still water that seemed depthless covered the floor.
What impressed the children first was a frog sitting on Galamiel Otterwell’s coffin. That was explicable: water, frog, place for frog to sit when not in water.
What impressed the children most, and nightmarishly until they themselves approached death, were the metallic-green blowflies, fat and important, sulkily muttering as though drunk. Why? Whence? The boys scratched their necks, and did not want to ask questions.
Great-Aunt Fanny was not at home.
As, they all said, they had all along all known.
The last niche was empty.
Rage (quite savage) and horror (sickening) overtook the Otterwells, and they edged more closely together. The rage was clear-cut at good money paid for what amounted to profanation, at being gypped—the Otterwells!—by a Mainland spiv. The horror was an atavistic and family horror that, somewhere—and they were responsible, which increased the horror—a section of their heritage and own lives had been lost as carelessly as a tennis racquet. Otterwells had been sunk in oceans, blown to bits in currently fashionable wars, buried in China, in Père Lachaise Cemetery near Sarah Bernhardt, in dozens of places, and even Ireland. Those were seemly enough; there was evidence; if tears were to fall they knew which quarter to splash towards. The losing of Great-Aunt Fanny was…was…
The men swore vilely, even Uncle Hereward who could rarely make up his mind. Uncle Eustace seemed to be planning something in the nature of a Royal Commission. The sun grew hotter. One aunt, foreseeing endlessness without tea, considered a fake half-faint on a suitably low tomb.
Meantime, where was Great-Aunt Fanny?
Varley, as always, came first to her senses. Precise and romantic and fervid, with her Otterwell-ink-dark but un-Otterwell-protruding eyes, she twined among them and conspiratorially revealed another truth to them. Presently, in silence, they had all turned their eyes towards the Cedar of Lebanon.
Without a word to each other the women started to move, to subtract themselves from the mingled group, to begin walking towards the cedar.
The men, dividing themselves from the children, moved a few paces after the women, and then stopped. The path to the cedar was not for them. They lit pipes and cigarettes, and turned inwards to each other, backs to the women, backs to the children. Life is not for men.
The children looked down their noses: they had been made to feel like children. They got smaller, starved-looking, even world-weary Young Christopher; they drew together and retreated. There was an impression of walking backwards from an insane world.
The women now began, young and old, to hasten, almost to run stumbling, towards Old Aunt. They had no manly or childish embarrassments; they were female, and of earth. Some began to weep as they hurried but without wiping away the great sweet tears, the soft soft tears, the tears coloured with life and death.
Old Aunt saw them coming, a pack with some appalling information to reveal, and some outrageous deed to do—it must have seemed so to her faded eyes. Yet, for she had been a woman too, she touched her scarf, and moved into the sunlight that was less kind to her painted wrinkles, and advanced towards them, fantastic and beautifully hideous. They were upon her; they surrounded her.
‘Oh, Beatrice!’ they cried, tears streaming down their smiles. ‘Oh, Aunt Beatrice, Great-Aunt isn’t there! She’s not there! Fanny isn’t there! Oh, Aunt Beatrice, where is Aunt Fanny? Lost! Gone! Not there! Empty, the niche is empty!’
Aunt Beatrice knew what they were telling, what gift they had run to bring her in their hands stained with graves. She closed her eyes happily against their happiness for her, yet two old tears, and two more, and another two, ran refreshingly as creeks through the drought of powder.
‘Poor Fanny!’ she said in her ecstasy.