We drank sherry with the smoked salmon, and as some small return for my aunts generosity to me in Brighton I had bought a bottle of burgundy, Chambertin 1959, Sir Arthur Keenes favourite, to go with the chicken à la king. When the wine had spread a pleasant glow through both our minds my aunt reverted to my conversation with Sergeant Sparrow.
He is determined, she said, that Wordsworth is the guilty party, yet it might equally well be one of us. I dont think the sergeant is a racialist, but he is class-conscious, and though the smoking of pot depends on no class barrier, he prefers to think otherwise and to put the blame on poor Wordsworth.
You and I can give each other an alibi, I said, and Wordsworth did run away.
We could have been in collusion, and Wordsworth might be taking his annual holiday. No, she went on, the mind of a policeman is set firmly in a groove. I remember once when I was in Tunis a travelling company was there who were playing Hamlet in Arabic. Someone saw to it that in the Interlude the Player King was really killed or rather not quite killed but severely damaged in the right ear by molten lead. And who do you suppose the police at once suspected? Not the man who poured the lead in, although he must have been aware that the ladle wasnt empty and was hot to the touch. Oh no, they knew Shakespeares play too well for that, and so they arrested Hamlets uncle.
What a lot of travelling you have done in your day, Aunt Augusta.
I havent reached nightfall yet[63], she said. If I had a companion I would be off tomorrow, but I can no longer lift a heavy suitcase, and there is a distressing lack of porters nowadays. As you noticed in Victoria.
We might one day, I said, continue our seaside excursions. I remember many years ago visiting Weymouth. There was a very pleasant green statue of George III[64] on the front.
I have booked two couchettes[65] a week from today on the Orient Express.
I looked at her in amazement. Where to? I asked.
Istanbul of course.
But it takes days
Three nights to be exact.
If you want to go to Istanbul surely it would be easier and less expensive to fly?
I only take a plane, my aunt said, when there is no alternative means of travel.
Its really quite safe.
Its a matter of choice, not nerves, Aunt Augusta said. I knew Wilbur Wright[66] very well indeed at one time. He took me for several trips. I always felt quite secure in his contraptions. But I cannot bear being spoken to all the timely irrelevant loud-speakers. One is not badgered at a railway station. An airport always reminds me of a Butlins Camp.
If you are thinking of me as a companion
Of course I am, Henry.
Im sorry, Aunt Augusta, but a bank managers pension is not a generous one.
I shall naturally pay all expenses. Give me another glass of wine, Henry. Its excellent.
Im not really accustomed to foreign travel. Youd find me
You will take to it[67] quickly enough in my company. The Pullings have all been great travellers. I think I must have caught the infection through your father.
Surely not my father He never travelled further than Central London.
He travelled from one woman to another, Henry, all through his life. That comes to much the same thing. New landscapes, new customs. The accumulation of memories. A long life is not a question of years. A man without memories might reach the age of a hundred and feel that his life had been a very brief one. Your father once said to me, The first girl I ever slept with was called Rose. Oddly enough she worked in a flower shop. It really seems a century ago. And then there was your uncle
I didnt know I had an uncle.
He was fifteen years older than your father and he died when you were very young.
He was a great traveller?
It took an odd form, my aunt said, in the end. I wish I could reproduce more clearly the tones of her voice. She enjoyed talking, she enjoyed telling a story. She formed her sentences carefully like a slow writer who foresees ahead of him the next sentence and guides his pen towards it. Not for her the broken phrase, the lapse of continuity. There was something classically precise, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say old-world, in her diction. The bizarre phrase, and occasionally, it must be agreed, a shocking one, gleamed all the more brightly from the old setting. As I grew to know her better, I began to regard her as bronze rather than brazen, a bronze which has been smoothed and polished by touch, like the horses knee in the lounge of the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo, which she once described to me, caressed by generations of gamblers.
Your uncle was a bookmaker known as Jo, Aunt Augusta said. A very fat man. I dont know why I say that, but I have always liked fat men. They have given up all unnecessary effort, for they have had the sense to realize that women do not, as men do, fall in love with physical beauty. Curran was stout and so was your father. Its easier to feel at home with a fat man.[68] Perhaps travelling with me, you will put on a little weight yourself. You had the misfortune to choose a nervous profession.