Erica Roberts
THE DARK SIDE
You are wondering about the sticking plaster on my nose and what's under it. I was lucky to score only a gash and a couple of stitches. She could have put out a tooth or the eye which saw too much.
I wish I could tell you I'd bumped into a cupboard door, run into a peg on the clothes line or had plastic surgery, everyday reasons for wearing unsightly bandaids but this wound has a deeper origin. Some of it comes from within and the rest was done by a pepper pot fast as a coconut shy and it didn't fall off the shelf, it was thrown. Aunt Louisa threw it.
Some people find it hard to believe the violence there is hanging about in the air. It lives in and around people like a sort of ectoplasm only waiting to be triggered off. Aunt Louisa had her violent emotions well battened down under her foundation garments. It must have shamed her whenever, in sudden gurgitation, they bubbled up and threatened to burst the buttons of her fine linen blouses. I can remember the rattle of her ringed fingers in the cutlery and the vibrations of her smart shoes roughing up the carpet.
Few people, I would say, ever witnessed the unleashing, like letting a wild dog off the chain, of my Aunt's raging. I was one of the unfortunates. Neither she nor I ever forgot the first blow up.
I was her least favourite niece, the nearest in age to her daughter, Marnie, and it was because of this that I was asked to stay at 'Weatherlea'. Marnie, sweet and round and fair, embodied all the things I longed to be. I was boney and dark and we were eight years old.
"Can Ruth sleep in my room?"
"We'll see".
"Please, Mummy, please. I promise we'll be good".
"You'll talk all night".
"No we won't, please Mummy. We'll be good won't we Ruthie?"
How could I say otherwise? Nobody intends to bring a house down around their ears. I was given the bed under the window, the curtains of which I will remember forever. They were thick and green and hung heavily from rings on a cedar pole.
Marnie and I didn't talk all night, we went to sleep early and woke up early. It would have been better the other way round but life has its own design. I was fashioned to move quickly and do things more
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sluggish children don't get around to doing. Marnie was a good if unimaginative child and I have never forgiven myself for the trouble I caused her.
The mattress, I discovered, was very springy. I could feel it the minute I climbed in. Like a jelly it wobbled and swayed and, while I slept on it quietly enough, the morning brought a straight out invitation to jump so I jumped.
"Come on Marnie, have a go", and Marnie came. We trampo- lined together wildly and gloriously and the bed groaned. You don't think, when you are eight and you have found an outlet for collected energy; you just do things. Up and down we jumped, up and down, with the breath forced out of our lungs and limbs all over the place.
It didn't last for long. One of us lost balance and grabbed the curtains for support. There was a terrible noise as the pole came off the hooks and the rings rattled madly along it. We were choking with dust and, shrouded in darkness and frightened under the curtains.
I have never seen anyone in such a temper as Aunt Louisa was that day. The air raged about her. I wished she had struck me dead but she vented her wrath on her own. She was in her nightie, her hair down and her face contorted so that she looked like a stranger. She dragged Marnie off the bed by the hair and smacked her so hard I could hear the sound above the yelling.
"It was me. It was me!", I cried and she just looked at me so cruelly I felt I had been struck with a thousand pins. She pulled the poor little tear-sodden Marnie out of the room and slammed the door.
For the rest of the day she kept us apart. I could see Marnie's tear.stained face beyond the stone wall, mingled with blotchy purple images of the wisteria out of focus because of my own tears.
Maybe Aunt Louisa did try to cope with her anger. She invited me to stay again, though once I had seen her dark side she had no respect for me. The witness cannot ever be forgiven since there is no way of rubbing out the stain in someone else's memory.
It seemed that I could not be anything but a poor influence on Marnie and a nuisance to my aunt. I was not conscious of any wish to lead her daughter astray. None of it was wilful. I did not plan the accidental half drowning of my favourite cousin at a river picnic and recoil when I think of the sky going dark as Aunt Louisa gave vent to her anger down there where the willows trailed the water. And the day had seemed so innocent.
The relationship with my aunt was blown from the start. It had a canker in it and though the wounds healed over from time to time there was no cure. Even when, as an adult, I stayed with her again I was somehow blamed for Marnie's marrying beneath her. Aunt didn't
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come right out and say it was my fault but I knew. Andrew was a perfectly good husband for Marnie. it was just that he didn't have any affectations and the social page wasn't interested, and I was responsi- ble for getting them together.
I couldn't win. Nothing about me pleased Aunt Louisa until I married David who just happened to be the son of the Archbishop. We had a big wedding in the Cathedral. Aunt Louisa, looking like a duchess, all charm and grace, was delighted. My choice appealed to her sense of the fitness of things. She gave David and me a Florentine dinner service with a heavy salt and pepper set to match. It was very decorative so I put the cruet on the shelf over the stove in Our flat.
Uncle died last year and Aunt Louisa moved to town. in a way it was natural that I saw a lot of her. She took a flat just round the corner.
Marnie lives happily in the country with her Andrew and isn't down much, so I had taken, ironically, the place of her daughter. We went to the theatre together and I helped her with her shopping. Only a few weeks ago we papered all her cupboards. Aunt prided herself on her flair for interior decoration. Her flat was very tasteful though she had too many roses on the wallpaper, the bedspread, even on the cup- board doors.
Our relationship at last seemed to have settled down. Until yesterday. There must be devils loose in the air triggering off the mechanisms of the tongue, so that it says things it shouldn't. We had come back from a bingo drive at her club. It must have been galling for her to watch me, a visitor, win a pocket calculator and a large bottle of perfume. Goodness knows I never won anything in my life except three teacups and saucers on one of those noisy whirring things at a fun fair and that was twenty years ago. I was so pleased but she seemed suddenly and unaccountably withdrawn.
We drove home in silence. I, hugging my good fortune to myself never imagined that she could begrudge me such small luxuries. But her rings jangled in her lap. I should have know. I saw her up the stairs and she fumbled with the key. Usually she would suggest we had a cup of coffee together but she was cool and removed. I didn't know quite why the evening had gone sour, she was jealous I suppose and then, for no reason at all I said it.
"There are too many roses around here. You'll have to get-rid of some
It was like throwing a match into a pool of petrol, a moment of expectancy and then whoosh, the whole place ablaze.
"How dare you come in here and tell me what to do with my wallpaper. How dare you question my taste" she thundered.
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Her face cleared for a moment as though the pressure had been relieved. A little frown flickered across her forehead and her cheek muscles relaxed. Suddenly she looked old and tired. I felt the sting had gone out of her. She dropped her arms and lowered herself into a chair.
"I think you'd better go now" she said coldly.
It was the dismissal that did it; her speaking to me as though I were a child again, the child she still disliked, the child who reminded her of those parts of herself she'd rather forget.
And the child in me responded. I went out angrily, closing the door with finality. There was in my heart the same hatred I had felt for her when she was hitting Marnie all those years ago. It had been covered over, masked like a livid scar under a necklace.
Suddenly I wondered why I had ever tried to like her, what perversity had made me order the difficult me to find her approval.
Why had I cultivated an alien person like Aunt Louisa? And I know it was an effort to control the depths of my hatred as riding up and down crowded escalators will help to cure agoraphobia.
I was on the landing, going down the stairs, hating more than I had ever hated anyone and myself, that I was still capable of such a choking emotion, unable to rid myself of it. At the bottom of the stairs I stopped to look back at her door, half inclined to go back and try again but the dark side won. I heard the daughter-in-law of an Archbishop say 'Horrible old tart' and then, though I didn't mean it 'Drop dead'.
And she did die, in her sleep last night, poor selfish, lonely old thing.
This morning the pepperpot hurled itself off the shelf and split my nose. I think I'd better light a candle for her.
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