Island of the Aunts

Chapter 2

By the time she was ten years old Minette had made the journey between London and Edinburgh forty-seven times. Forty-seven station buffet sandwiches; forty-seven visits to the loo on the train and forty-seven stomach-aches because changing families always churned up her insides.

Minette’s father lived in Edinburgh in a tall grey house and was a Professor of Grammar. Minette’s mother lived in a flat in London and was an actress — at least she would have been if anyone had given her any work. They had been separated since Minette was three years old and they hated each other with a bitter and deadly hatred.

“Tell that louse of a father of yours that he’s late with his money again,” was the sort of message that Minette’s mother usually sent as she took her daughter to King’s Cross to put her on the train to Edinburgh. Or:

“No doubt your mother is still running a doss-house for drunken actors,” her father would say as he fetched her from the train.

Minette never gave her parents these messages. She made up polite friendly messages for them to send each other but neither her mother nor her father believed her when she delivered them. And on the journey, which took five hours when she first began to travel, Minette would look out of the window searching for houses where she and her mother and her father would live together one day like an ordinary family with a cat and a canary and a dog. For it went on hurting her, hurting and hurting — not that her parents were separated; lots of children she knew had separated parents — but that they hated each other so much.

On these journeys Minette was usually put in the charge of an aunt. The aunt came from an office called Useful Aunts and what she was like was important because if she talked all the time or wanted to play silly games, Minette couldn’t give her mind to finding houses for her parents to live in, or imagining beautiful scenes where she was run over and taken to hospital and her mother and father rushed to her bedside and looked at each other over their daughter’s bleeding body and found that they loved each other after all.

Then as she got up to go on her forty-eighth journey, Minette suddenly realized that it didn’t matter what kind of aunt they sent to take her because she had given up hope. Her parents would always hate each other and she would spend the rest of her life travelling from London to Edinburgh and back again, never quite knowing which was her home or where she properly belonged.

And as though someone Up There had heard her, they sent her that day a quite extraordinary aunt.

She was so unlike the other aunts she had travelled with that both Minette and her mother stopped dead as they came up to where she waited, by the bookstall on Platform One of King’s Cross Station.

“Are you…?” began Mrs Danby.

The woman nodded. She was very tall with a small moustache and carried a large holdall which smelled slightly of fish.

“I am your aunt,” she said in a deep voice and pointed to her lapel on which there was a label saying Unusual Aunts and above that the words “My name is Etta”.

If Minette’s mother hadn’t been in a hurry to go to the cinema with her latest boyfriend she might have asked more questions. After all an Unusual Aunt is not quite the same as a Useful one, but as it was she handed over the money for the tickets and Minette’s lunch, took the cigarette out of her mouth long enough to kiss her daughter, and went away.

And presently Minette and the aunt sat opposite each other in one of those old-fashioned compartments which have no corridor and watched the train make its way through the London suburbs.

Aunt Etta and her sisters had had a hard week in London. They found a boarding house full of people like themselves — aunt-like persons who had come to town to show their pug dogs at dog shows or go to meetings about setting up retirement homes for ancient donkeys. But they hated the noise and the traffic and the dirty air, and they did not find it easy to get taken on by an agency.

Even when Etta got her label and was sent out on jobs, the children she was given were unspeakable. She took a little boy on a trip down the river who spent the whole time stuffing himself with ice cream and popcorn and crisps and dropping the wrappers in the water. She was sent to take a small girl to have her teeth cleaned and saw her bite the dentist’s hand, and she sat with a whining brat called Tarquin Sterndale-Fish who had the measles.

So by the time she met Minette on King’s Cross Station, Etta had begun to think that this kidnapping idea was pretty stupid. The world seemed to be full of Boo-Boos and Little Ones and it was better to become extinct, like the rainforests, than to bring such children to the Island.

Her first sight of Minette did not make her feel hopeful. The child had a crumpled, pinched sort of look; she was small for her age and very thin and looked as though she had been born tired. A wet and feeble child would be quite useless for the work that had to be done. She was also very stupidly dressed with a load of fluffy pom-poms in her long brown hair and a T-shirt which said Pinch me and I’ll squeal—and a pink plastic handbag shaped like a heart dangled from her shoulder.

And if Aunt Etta did not like the look of Minette, Minette was not in the least keen on Aunt Etta.

For a while the two of them sat in silence. From time to time a drop of water fell from the canvas holdall that the aunt had put on the luggage rack on to her topknot of grey hair, but she did not seem to notice it.

“Is something leaking?” asked Minette.

The aunt looked up and shook her head. “The canvas never seems to dry out properly. I use it to move seals about. Only pups of course; a full-grown seal would never fit inside.”

Minette began to be interested; her face lost its pinched and troubled look. “Are you a vet, then?”

“Not exactly. But that does sort of come into it.”

There was another silence. Minette did not like to pry so she looked out of the window again. They were coining to the first of the dream houses which Minette had chosen to live in with her parents. It was an old station-master’s house with hanging baskets of flowers and a little gable. And as though she read her thoughts, the aunt said: “What a pleasant place to live in. There might be ghost trains going through at night with interesting spectres. That could liven things up.”

Minette stared at her. “Do you believe in—”

“Of course,” said the aunt briskly. “Certainly. I believe in almost everything, don’t you?”

“My father says we mustn’t believe anything we can’t see or prove,” she said.

“Really?”

When they had been travelling for an hour, Minette opened her suitcase and became very busy. She had been wearing pink and orange socks with a border of Mickey Mice. Now she took them off and put on plain white ones. Then she removed the T-shirt which said Pinch me and I’ll squeal and put on a navy-blue one with long sleeves and no writing at all. And lastly she put the dangling handbag back in the suitcase and took out a practical leather purse.

The aunt said nothing, watching as Minette changed from a trendy little dresser to a sensible old-fashioned schoolgirl.

But Minette had not finished. She took out her brush and comb, propped a mirror on her knees, and began to plait her hair into two long, tight pigtails.

“I always change here,” she explained, “because there’s nothing interesting to look at out of the window. My father doesn’t like clothes with writing on. Or funny socks. He thinks they’re vulgar. And he hates untidy hair.”

“And when you come back you change back again — put on the pom-poms and unplait your hair?”

“Yes. My mother likes it loose.”

“And you? Which do you like?”

Minette sighed. “I’d like it cut short.”

“Well I have some scissors here. Why don’t we cut it?” She opened a very large handbag and took out a pair of scissors.

“Oh no! I couldn’t. Then both of them would be angry.”

Aunt Etta shrugged and dropped the scissors back into her bag. “Actually long hair can be useful.”

“How can it?”

“Oh for polishing things…oyster shells and suchlike. And if you fell into the water it would be something to get hold of.”

They had come to the second of Minette’s dream houses, a low white house on the bend of a river with a willow tree and a garden sloping down to the water. But this time Minette did not see her mother and father taking tea together on the lawn. She heard her father saying, “That willow must come down, it cuts off all the light,”—and her mother saying, “If you cut that tree down I’ll have you put in a mental home.”

And suddenly, for no reason, she told this strange woman about her endless journeys from her mother’s tiny flat with its smell of face powder and curry from the takeaway downstairs, and the tights dripping in the bathroom, to her father’s cold, tidy, solemn house with its ticking grandfather clock. And about the silly dreams she’d had of bringing them together and the hopelessness of it all.

“Do you think there might be a third place? Not my father’s house or my mother’s flat but somewhere else — by the sea perhaps? And that one day I might find it?”

She drew back, suddenly frightened, because the fierce aunt was looking at her far too intently.

But Aunt Etta was nodding. “Of course,” she said. “Of course there is a third place. There is one for everybody. But it’s no good filling it up with people from your old life. If you want to find the third place you must find it alone.”

“But I’m a child. I can’t go and live alone.”

“Perhaps not. Not exactly, but you might be able to make a new start just the same if you had the courage.”

“I don’t have courage,” said Minette firmly. “I’m a coward.” It was one of the few things on which her parents agreed. “I’m frightened of the dark and of diving off the top board and of being bullied.”

The train stopped at York and the aunt bought sandwiches off a trolley. “Now I suggest you go and wash your hands and freshen up,” she said, “because it’s time we had our lunch. Which of these sandwiches would you like — egg and cress or cheese and tomato?”

“Cheese and tomato, please.”

If Minette had known what was going to happen as soon as she had gone she would have been very scared indeed. For out of the pocket of her long navy-blue knickers the aunt took a little box with a brownish powder which she sprinkled carefully into the centre of the cheese and tomato sandwich. Then she unzipped the holdall and sat back in her seat with a very contented smile.

“My first one,” she murmured to herself. “My very first one. Oh really, this is most exciting!” And then: “I wonder how Coral is getting on?”

It had been much harder to get Coral to look like an Agency Aunt. She was the plump one who had been to art school when she was young, and she liked to stand out from the crowd, but she had done her best to look sensible. She only wore two necklaces and one pair of dangly earrings and the hand-painted squiggles on her robe and matching turban were peaceful squiggles, so that when she rang the bell of the big house in Mayfair she felt that she looked as aunt-like as she ever would.

The idea of fetching Hubert-Henry Mountjoy from his grandparents’ London house and taking him back to his boarding school in Berkshire made Aunt Coral feel extremely glum.

Her first batch of children had been as bad as Etta’s: a poisonous, podgy child who had tried to kick her shins, and a little boy who jumped on a beetle in the park. She was sure that Hubert-Henry Mountjoy would not be her cup of tea — a cold-eyed, snotty little aristo too big for his boots — and she had decided that if she caught him jumping on beetles she would wallop him hard and give up being an aunt and go home.

As she was shown into the Mountjoys’ hall by a toffee-nosed maid, she felt worse than ever. The house was huge and dark and cold; there was a big brass gong in one corner; paintings of dead Mountjoys with handlebar moustaches hung on the walls. She waited for her first sight of Hubert-Henry in his school uniform with the deepest gloom.

The door of the drawing room opened. A small boy came out, pushed forward by a tall, white-haired man who looked exactly like the men in the portraits except that he wasn’t dead — and her mouth dropped very slightly open.

Hubert-Henry was small and lightly built with jet-black hair, olive skin and huge, very dark eyes. Something about the graceful way he moved and the wary look on his face reminded her of pictures she had seen of the children of South America who made their home among the vines and orchids and broad-leaved trees of the tropical forest.

The old man with the handlebar moustache now spoke. “This is Hubert-Henry,” he said in a braying voice. “As you see he was not born an English gentleman — but we mean to see that he becomes one, eh, Hubert?”

And as he dug the silent little boy in the ribs, Aunt Coral saw a look of such hatred pass over the child’s face that she took a step backwards and hit her backside on the big brass gong. At which point Hubert-Henry threw back his head and laughed.

Half an hour later, they sat side by side in a large black car on the way to Hubert’s school. The car was a closed limo and was the kind you hire for weddings and funerals, with a glass partition sealing off the chauffeur. It was a three-hour journey to Berkshire but the driver had refused to take Hubert-Henry by himself, so Aunt Coral was to deliver him to Greymarsh Towers and hand him over to the matron. The little boy, it seemed, had tried to jump from the train and run away the last time they took him back to his boarding school.

“Are you really called Hubert-Henry?” asked Aunt Coral as they began to leave London behind.

“No.”

“What are you called?”

“Fabio.”

He had a slight accent. Spanish, perhaps? Or Portuguese?

She hoped he would say more but he sat silent and sulky. Then: “I said I’d bash the next aunt they fobbed me off with. Bash her really hard.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t do that,” said Coral. “I’ve got a kick like a mule. It’s the hair, you see?”

“What hair?”

“The hair on my legs. We’ve all got hairy legs, me and my sisters. Hair gives you strength; it says so in the Bible. Samson and all that.”

But she wasn’t really thinking about what she was saying. Aunt Coral was a little bit psychic, as artistic people so often are — which means that she sometimes knew things without knowing how she knew them — and now she dug into her basket, took out a pad and a piece or charcoal and began to draw.

Fabio, still sulky, turned his head away. When she had finished, she put the picture down on the seat between them. Presently she heard a little gasp. The boy had seized the paper and was devouring it with his eyes, and she saw a single tear run down his cheek.

“Is that what your home was like?” she asked gently.

Fabio nodded. “The tree’s right; it was a papaya, and the monkey…he was a capuchin and I tamed him. But there were three huts joined together, not just one — we lived in the end one closest to the river. The chickens were ours but the goat belonged to my uncle in the middle house. You’ve got the pig right, but his stomach was even bigger — it touched the ground.”

“So why did you leave, Fabio?” she asked. The homesick child was still staring at the picture she had drawn; the river, the great tree with fruit hanging from its branches and the fishing boat drawn up on the shore.

“I don’t know exactly,” he said. But he told her what he knew and she pieced the rest together.

His father, Henry Mountjoy, had been an Englishman, rich, and the owner of a big house in the country; but he was a gambler. He got into debt and in the end he had gone off to South America to find gold.

Only of course he didn’t find gold. He fell ill and Fabio’s mother, who was a dancer in a nightclub, had found him half starving in Rio, and had nursed him, and after a while he married her.

But he’d ruined his health and he couldn’t get work and soon after Fabio was born he went back to England. Since then Fabio had lived first with his mother in Rio and then, when she moved in with another man, upriver in the forest with his grandparents and his uncle and his cousins. There were a lot of people in the three huts and very little money but Fabio had been perfectly happy. His grandfather was an Amorian Indian and knew everything, and his grandmother had worked as a cook for a Portuguese planter and had told the most marvellous stories.

Then just over a year ago his mother had come with an Englishman in a silly suit who kept mopping his face all the time and wrinkled up his nose when he passed the pig. It turned out that Fabio’s father had died and on his deathbed had begged his parents, the old Mountjoys, to bring Fabio to England and bring him up as an English gentleman.

That was the beginning of the nightmare. His mother had insisted that he went. Henry Mountjoy had talked so much about his grand house in England that she wanted her son to have his share. But the grand house had been sold to pay Henry’s debts, and Henry’s parents took one look at the wild little boy and shuddered.

Since the grandparents were too old to turn Fabio into an English gentleman, this odd thing was to be done in a boarding school. But boarding schools, according to the old Mountjoys, had gone soft. They had tried two from which Fabio had returned much as before, only speaking better English.

Greymarsh Towers, though, was different. The headmaster believed not just in cold baths and stiff upper lips but in all sorts of things that one would have thought didn’t happen any more, and the boys were vile.

“They call me ‘monkey’ or ‘chopsticks’ and try to tie me up. But I’m going to kill them this time. I’m going to kill them and I’m going to kill the headmaster and they can take me to prison and I don’t care!”

But before he could get round to killing the headmaster, Fabio started being sick.

He was sick outside Slough, and on the far side of Maidenhead and in the entrance of a house called The Laurels in Reading, and the closer they got to Greymarsh Towers, the sicker Fabio became.

And when she saw Greymarsh Towers, Coral thought that she too would be sick if she had to return there. It was a huge bleak house with iron bars across the windows, and the stone walls looked slimy and cold.

It was now time to act. The chauffeur was supposed to drop them at the school and she was to make her own way back by train.

“Will you please wait here, Fabio,” she said to the boy. “Keep an eye on him, Mr Fowler. Don’t let him run away.”

The boy, who had begun to trust her, cowered back in his seat and Coral marched up to the front door. The smell of Greymarsh would have been enough to put her off for life. Hospital disinfectant, tortured cabbage, lavatories…

As for Matron, as she came out of her office she would have made a very good camel: the nose was right, the sneering upper lip, and the distrustful muddy eyes. Except that camels can’t help their expressions and people can.

“I am afraid I have bad news about Hubert-Henry Mountjoy,” said Aunt Coral. “He has been laid low with a bad attack of Burry-Burry fever and can’t come back to school at present.”

Matron pursed her mouth.

“Well, of course, that is what you expect from foreign children — he probably picked it up in his hut in the jungle.”

Since Aunt Coral had just invented Burry-Burry fever she only nodded and said she would let Matron know as soon as the boy was better. She then returned to the car and said, “I am sorry to tell you that there has been an outbreak of meningitis in the school. Everyone is in quarantine and Hubert can’t go back at present.”

The little boy, who had been hunched against the cushions, now sat up and smiled. He had a very nice smile and Aunt Coral made up her mind.

“Well, I can’t take him back,” said the surly driver. “I’m going on to another job down in the West Country and I haven’t a minute to waste.”

“That’s all right,” said Coral. “Just take us to the station. We’ll make our own way back to London.”

Sitting on the station platform, Coral noticed the exact moment when Fabio’s happiness at the thought of escaping school changed to misery at the thought of going back to his grandparents’ dungeon of a house.

She hadn’t had any real doubts but now she was certain. Should she use chloroform? Or the sleeping powder that Etta used?

Either way, thought Coral, Fabio was the one.

Etta and Coral had been right. Aunt Myrtle should never have been allowed to come on the kidnapping job. Almost as soon as she arrived in London she was so homesick that she thought she would die. She missed the sound of the waves on the rocks and the scent of the clover and the way the clouds raced across the high clean sky. But most of all she missed Herbert. She was used to sitting on the point every day and playing the cello to him, and now she began to worry in case he was missing her too.

Or not missing her, which would have been even worse.

So by the time she was sent to take Lambert Sprott to the zoo because his father was doing business in New York and his mother was buying clothes in Paris, Aunt Myrtle was in a bad way. Her hair kept falling down, she had a headache, and the map of the zoo looked complicated.

As for Lambert, he was a boy it was not easy to take to. He had pale distrustful eyes, a tight mouth, and carried a wallet full of money, a pocket calculator and his own mobile telephone so that he looked like a shrunken bank manager, except that bank managers have learnt to be friendly and Lambert had not.

All the same she was determined to do her best, and to share with the boy the beauty of the animals they saw: the knock-kneed giraffes with their long black tongues, the dignified orangutans with the tufts of red hair under their armpits, the Mississippi alligator, smiling as he steamed in his pool.

“Oh how fascinating animals are, are they not, Lambert!” she cried, getting carried away. “Look at those bonteboks — the way they carry their heads. And over there, the dear dik-diks — so small but so fast when they run.”

Lambert yawned. “They smell,” he said.

Myrtle was shocked. “Well, they have their own scent, yes, but so do you. To a bontebok you would smell of human.”

“No, I wouldn’t.”

Aunt Myrtle sighed, but she was determined not to give up. There must be a flicker of life somewhere in the boy. And there was: when something cost a lot of money Lambert became quite alert. He told Myrtle that you could get twenty thousand pounds for the horn of the white rhino, and that the Siberian tiger could fetch double that because it was so rare.

“And so beautiful,” cried Myrtle. “Look at the markings on its throat.”

Lambert yawned again — he was not at all interested in things being beautiful and he stopped to dial a friend on his mobile telephone, but the friend was out. “I wouldn’t mind going shopping,” he said. “I’ve got my own account at Harrods.”

But Myrtle had not been told to take him shopping and, ignoring his whining, she led the way across a little stone bridge and stopped dead.

They had come to the seals. The females lay about like old armchairs, coughing and grunting, but there was one, a young bull seal, who seemed to be staring directly at her.

Tears of homesickness came into Myrtle’s eyes; it could have been Herbert’s brother lying there! “Oh, Lambert,” she said making a last attempt, “look at the way his whiskers curve, and the shine on his skin. Did you ever see anything so lovely?”

“They aren’t worth anything,” said Lambert in a bored voice. “You can’t get any money for seals. They’re common.”

And then he opened his mouth and yawned once more. He yawned so that Myrtle saw his unhealthy tongue, his tonsils, even the little flap of skin at the back of the throat that stops the food going down the wrong way — and something snapped inside her.

She wouldn’t kidnap this loathsome child in a hundred years. The thought of waking up on the Island and knowing he was there made her blood run cold, and she could no more soil her cello case by stuffing the repulsive brat into it than she could fly. She would take Lambert back to his house and tell her sisters that she was a failure as a kidnapper, and she would go home.

Once she had decided this she felt better, but there was a long afternoon to get through still; one of the longest of her life, it seemed to Myrtle. Lambert lived in a large house bristling with burglar alarms and fitted with ankle-deep carpets, a private bar, a swimming pool, and a kitchen full of gadgets which hummed and pulsed and throbbed and which she had no idea how to use.

What Lambert’s house didn’t have in it was any people. His father was busy getting rich, and his mother was busy spending the money he made, so neither of them spent much time at home. Myrtle had been told to wait till the woman who gave Lambert his supper came, and hand him over.

Lambert sat down in front of an enormous telly and started zapping channels in a bored way, and Myrtle made her way to the bathroom to freshen up. She had decided to flush the chloroform down the loo; it bothered her having it when she had given up as a kidnapper, so she took the bottle and her bag of hairpins and made her way upstairs.

“What have you got there?” Lambert’s suspicious voice made her turn round. He had put his telephone in his pocket and was glaring at her, narrowing his eyes. “You’re stealing something. What’s in that bottle?”

He leant forward to try and snatch the bottle. Aunt Myrtle put it behind her back but Lambert kicked her hard in the shins, twisted her free arm and grabbed the bottle. Then he undid the stopper and put his nose to it.

“Don’t!” cried Myrtle. “Put it down, Lambert.”

But it was too late. The loathsome boy lay felled and quite unconscious on the floor.