Travels with My Aunt
by Graham Greene

CHAPTER ONE

I met my Aunt Augusta for the first time in more than half a century at my mother's funeral. My mother was approaching eighty-six when she died, and my aunt was some eleven or twelve years younger. I had retired from the bank two years before with an adequate pension and a silver handshake. There had been a takeover by the Westminster and my branch was considered redundant. Everyone thought me lucky, but I found it difficult to occupy my time. I have never married, I have always lived quietly, and, apart from my interest in dahlias, I have no hobby. For those reasons I found myself agreeably excited by my mother's funeral.

My father had been dead for more than forty years. He was a building contractor of a lethargic disposition who used to take afternoon naps in all sorts of curious places. This irritated my mother, who was an energetic woman, and she used to seek him out to disturb him. As a child I remember going to the bathroom--we lived in Highgate then--and finding my father asleep in the bath in his clothes. I am rather short-sighted and I thought that my mother had been cleaning an overcoat, until I heard my father whisper, 'Bolt the door on the inside when you go out.' He was too lazy to get out of the bath and too sleepy, I suppose, to realize that his order was quite impossible to carry out. At another time, when he was responsible for a new block of flats in Lewisham, he would take his catnap in the cabin of the giant crane, and construction would he halted until he woke. My mother, who had a good head for heights, would climb ladders to the highest scaffolding in the hope of discovering him, when as like as not he would have found a corner in what was to be the underground garage. I had always thought of them as reasonably happy together: their twin roles of the hunter and the hunted probably suited them, for my mother by the time I first remembered her had developed an alert poise of the head and a wary trotting pace which reminded me of a gun-dog. I must be forgiven these memories of the past: at a funeral they are apt to come unbidden, there is so much waiting about.

Not many people attended the service, which took place at a famous crematorium, but there was that slight stirring of excited expectation which is never experienced at a graveside. Will the oven doors open? Will the coffin stick on the way to the flames? I heard a voice behind me saying in very clear cold accents, 'I was present once at a premature cremation.'

It was, as I recognized with some difficulty from a photograph in the family album, my Aunt Augusta, who had arrived late, dressed rather as the late Queen Mary of beloved memory might have dressed if she had still been with us and had adapted herself a little bit towards the present mode. I was surprised by her brilliant red hair, monumentally piled, and her two big front teeth which gave her a vital Neanderthal air. Somebody said, 'Hush,' and a clergyman began a prayer which I believe he must have composed himself. I had never heard it at any other funeral service, and I have attended a great number in my time. A bank manager is expected to pay his last respects to every old client who is not as we say 'in the red', and in any case I have a weakness for funerals. People are generally seen at their best on these occasions, serious and sober, and optimistic on the subject of personal immortality.

The funeral of my mother went without a hitch. The flowers were removed economically from the coffin, which at the touch of a button slid away from us out of sight. Afterwards in the troubled sunlight I shook hands with a number of nephews and nieces and cousins whom I hadn't seen for years and could not identify. It was understood that I had to wait for the ashes and wait I did, while the chimney of the crematorium gently smoked overhead.

'You must be Henry,' Aunt Augusta said, gazing reflectively at me with her sea-deep blue eyes.

'Yes,' I said, 'and you must be Aunt Augusta.'

'It's a very long time since I saw anything of your mother,' Aunt Augusta told me. 'I hope that her death was an easy one.'

'Oh yes, you know, at her time of life--her heart just stopped. She died of old age.'

'Old age? She was only twelve years older than I am,' Aunt Augusta said accusingly.

We took a little walk together in the garden of the crematorium. A crematorium garden resembles a real garden about as much as a golf links resembles a genuine landscape. The lawns are too well cultivated and the trees too stiffly on parade: the urns resemble the little boxes containing sand where one tees up. 'Tell me,' Aunt Augusta said, 'are you still at the bank?'

'No, I retired two years ago.'

'Retired? A young man like you! For heaven's sake, what do you do with your time?'

'I cultivate dahlias, Aunt Augusta.' She gave a regal right-about swing of a phantom bustle.

'Dahlias! Whatever would your father have said!'

'He took no interest in flowers, I know that. He always thought a garden was a waste of good building space. He would calculate how many bedrooms one above the other he could have fitted in. He was a very sleepy man.'

'He needed bedrooms for more than sleep,' my aunt said with a coarseness which surprised me.

'He slept in the oddest places. I remember once in the bathroom...'

'In a bedroom he did other things than sleep,' she said. 'You are the proof.'

I began to understand why my parents had seen so little of Aunt Augusta. She had a temperament my mother would not have liked. My mother was far from being a puritan, but she wanted everything to be done or said at a suitable time. At meals we would talk about meals. Perhaps the price of food. If we went to the theatre we talked in the interval about the play--or other plays. At breakfast we spoke of the news. She was adept at guiding conversation back into the right channel if it strayed. She had a phrase, 'My dear, this isn't the moment...' Perhaps in the bedroom, I found myself thinking, with something of Aunt Augusta's directness, she talked about love. That was why she couldn't bear my father sleeping in odd places, and, when I developed an interest in dahlias, she often warned me to forget about them during banking hours.

By the time we had finished our walk the ashes were ready for me. I had chosen a very classical urn in black steel, and I would have liked to assure myself that there had been no error, but they presented me with a package very neatly done up in brown paper with red paper seals which reminded me of a Christmas gift. 'What are you going to do with it?' Aunt Augusta said.

'I thought of making a little throne for it among my dahlias.'

'It will look a little bleak in winter.'

'I hadn't considered that. I could always bring it indoors at that season.'

'Backwards and forwards. My sister seems hardly likely to rest in peace.'

'I'll think over it again.'

'You are not married, are you?'

'No.'

'Any children?'

'Of course not.'

'There is always the question to whom you will bequeath my sister. I am likely to predecease you.'

'One cannot think of everything at once.'

'You could have left it here,' Aunt Augusta said.

'I thought it would look well among the dahlias,' I replied obstinately, for I had spent all the previous evening designing a simple plinth in good taste.

'"A chacun son gout,"' my aunt said with a surprisingly good French accent. I had never considered our family very cosmopolitan.

'Well, Aunt Augusta,' I said at the gates of the crematorium (I was preparing to leave, for my garden called), 'it's been many years since we saw each other...I hope...' I had left the lawn-mower outside, uncovered, and there was a hint of rain in the quick grey clouds overhead. 'I would like it very much if one day you would take a cup of tea with me in Southwood.'

'At the moment I would prefer something stronger and more tranquillizing. It is not every day one sees a sister consigned to the flames. Like the Pucelle.'

'I don't quite...'

'Joan of Arc.'

'I have some sherry at home, but it's rather a long ride and perhaps...'

'My apartment is at any rate north of the river,' Aunt Augusta said firmly, 'and I have everything we require.' Without asking my assent she hailed a taxi. It was the first and perhaps, when I think back on it now, the most memorable of the journeys we were to take together.

CHAPTER TWO

I was quite right in my weather forecast. The grey clouds began to rain and I found myself preoccupied with my private worries. All along the shiny streets people were putting up umbrellas and taking shelter in the doorways of Burton's, the United Dairies, Mac Fisheries or the ABC. For some reason rain in the suburbs reminds me of a Sunday.

'What's on your mind?' Aunt Augusta said.

'It was so stupid of me. I left my lawn-mower out, on the lawn, uncovered.'

My aunt showed me no sympathy. She said, 'Forget your lawn-mower. It's odd how we seem to meet only at religious ceremonies. The last time I saw you was at your baptism. I was not asked but I came.' She gave a croak of a laugh. 'Like the wicked fairy.'

'Why didn't they ask you?'

'I knew too much. About both of them. I remember you were far too quiet. You didn't yell the devil out. I wonder if he is still there?' She called to the driver, 'Don't confuse the Place with the Square, the Crescent or the Gardens. I am the Place.'

'I didn't know there was any breach. Your photograph was there in the family album.'

'For appearances only.' She gave a little sigh which drove out a puff of scented powder. 'Your mother was a very saintly woman. She should by rights have had a white funeral. La Pucelle,' she added again.

'I don't quite see...La Pucelle means--well, to put it bluntly, "I" am here, Aunt Augusta.'

'Yes. But you were your father's child. Not your mother's.'

That morning I had been very excited, even exhilarated, by the thought of the funeral. Indeed, if it had not been my mother's, I would have found it a wholly desirable break in the daily routine of retirement, and I was pleasurably reminded of the old banking days, when I had paid the final adieu to so many admirable clients. But I had never contemplated such a break as this one which my aunt announced so casually. Hiccups are said to be cured by a sudden shock and they can equally be caused by one. I hiccupped an incoherent question.

'I have said that your official mother was a saint. The girl, you see, refused to marry your father, who was anxious--if you can use such an energetic term in his case--to do the right thing. So my sister covered up for her by marrying him. (He was not very strong-willed.) Afterwards, she padded herself for months with progressive cushions. No one ever suspected. She even wore the cushions in bed, and she was so deeply shocked when your father tried once to make love to her--after the marriage but before your birth--that, even when you had been safety delivered, she refused him what the Church calls his rights. He was never a man in any case to stand on them.'

I leant back hiccupping in the taxi. I couldn't have spoken if I had tried. I remembered all those pursuits up the scaffolding. Had they been caused then by my mother's jealousy or was it the apprehension that she might be required to pass again so many more months padded with cushions of assorted sizes?

'No,' my aunt said to the taxi-driver, 'these are the Gardens. I told you--I am the Place.'

'Then I turn left, ma'am?'

'No. Right. On the left is the Crescent.

'This shouldn't come as a shock to you, Henry,' Aunt Augusta said. 'My sister--your stepmother--perhaps we should agree to call her that--was a very noble person indeed.'

'And my--hic--father?'

'A bit of a hound, but so are most men. Perhaps it's their best quality. I hope you have a little bit of the hound in you too, Henry.'

'I don't--huc--think so.'

'We may discover it in time. You "are" your father's son. That hiccup is best cured by drinking out of the opposite rim of a glass. You can imitate a glass with your hand. Liquid is not a necessary part of the cure.'

I drew a long free breath and asked, 'Who was my mother, Aunt Augusta?' But she was already far away from that subject, speaking to the driver. 'No, no, my man. This is the Crescent.'

'You said turn "right," lady.'

'Then I apologize. It was my mistake. I am always a little uncertain about right and left. Port I can always remember because of the colour--red means left. You should have turned to port not starboard.'

'I'm no bloody navigator, lady.'

'Never mind. Just continue all the way round and start again. I take all the blame.'

We drew up outside a public house. The driver said, 'Ma'am, if you had only told me it was the Crown and Anchor...'

'Henry', my aunt said, 'if you could forget your hiccup for a moment.'

'Huc?' I asked.

'It's six and six on the clock,' the driver said.

'Then we will let it reach seven shillings,' Aunt Augusta retorted. 'Henry, I feel I ought perhaps to warn you before we go in that a white funeral in my case would have been quite out of place.'

'But-you've-never-married,' I said, very quickly to beat the hiccups.

'I have nearly always, during the last sixty or more years, had a friend,' Aunt Augusta said. She added, perhaps because I looked incredulous, 'Age, Henry, may a little modify our emotions--it does not destroy them.'

Even those words did not prepare me properly for what I found next. My life in the bank had taught me, of course, to be unsurprised, even by the demand for startling overdrafts, and I had always made it a point neither to ask for nor to listen to any explanation. The overdraft was given or refused simply on the previous credit of the client. If I seem to the reader a somewhat static character he should appreciate the long conditioning of my career before retirement. My aunt, I was to discover, had never been conditioned by anything at all, and she had no intention of explaining more than she had already done.

CHAPTER THREE

The Crown and Anchor was built like a bank in Georgian style. Through the windows I could see men with exaggerated moustaches in tweed coats, which were split horsily behind, gathered round a girl in jodhpurs. They were not the type to whom I would have extended much credit, and I doubted whether any of them, except the girl, had ever ridden a horse. They were all drinking bitter, and I had the impression that any spare cash they might have put aside went on tailors and hairdressers rather than equitation. A long experience with clients has made me prefer a shabby whisky-drinker to a well-dressed beer-drinker.

We went in by a side door. My aunt's apartment was on the second floor, and on the first floor there was a small sofa which I learnt later had been bought by my aunt so that she could take a little rest on the way up. It was typical of her generous nature that she had bought a sofa, which could barely be squeezed on to the landing, and not a chair for one. 'I always take a little rest at this point. Come and sit down, too, Henry. The stairs are steep, though perhaps they don't seem so at your age.' She looked at me critically. 'You have certainly changed a lot since I saw you last, though you haven't got much more hair.'

'I've had it, but I've lost it,' I explained.

'I have kept mine. I can still sit upon it.' She added surprisingly, 'Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair. Not that I could have ever let it down from a second-floor flat.'

'Aren't you disturbed by the noise from the bar?'

'Oh no. And the bar is very convenient if I suddenly run short. I just send Wordsworth down.'

'Who is Wordsworth?'

'I call him Wordsworth because I can't bring myself to call him Zachary. All the eldest sons in his family have been called Zachary for generations--after Zachary Macaulay who did so much for them on Clapham Common. The surname was adopted from the bishop not the poet.'

'He's your valet?'

'Let us say he attends to my wants. A very gentle sweet strong person. But don't let him ask you for a CTC. He receives quite enough from me.'

'What is a CTC?'

'That is what they called any tip or gift in Sierra Leone when he was a boy during the war. The initials belonged to Cape to Cairo Cigarettes which all the sailors handed out generously.'

My aunt's conversation went too quickly for my understanding, so that I was not really prepared for the very large middle-aged negro wearing a striped butcher's apron who opened the door when my aunt rang. 'Why, Wordsworth,' she said with a touch of coquetry, 'you've been washing up breakfast without waiting for me.' He stood there glaring at me, and I wondered whether he expected a CTC before he would let me pass.

'This is my nephew, Wordsworth,' my aunt said.

'You be telling me whole truth, woman?'

'Of course I am. Oh Wordsworth, Wordsworth!' she added with tender banter.

He let us in. The lights were on in the living-room, now that the day had darkened, and my eyes were dazzled for a moment by rays from the glass ornaments which flashed back from every open space. There were angels on the buffet wearing robes striped like peppermint rock; and in an alcove there was a Madonna with a gold face and a gold halo and a blue robe. On a sideboard on a gold stand stood a navy-blue goblet, large enough to hold at least four bottles of wine, with a gold trellis curled around the bowl on which pink roses grew and green ivy. There were mauve storks on the bookshelves and red swans and blue fish. Black girls in scarlet dresses held green candle sconces, and shining down on all this was a chandelier which might have been made out of sugar icing hung with pale blue, pink and yellow blossoms.

'Venice once meant a lot to me,' my aunt said rather unnecessarily.

I don't pretend to be a judge of these things, but I thought the effect exaggerated and not in the best of taste.

'Such wonderful craftsmanship,' my aunt said. 'Wordsworth, be a dear and fetch us two whiskies. Augusta feels a teeny bit sad after the sad sad ceremony.' She spoke to him as though he were a child--or a lover, but that relationship I was reluctant to accept.

'Everything go ok?' Wordsworth asked. 'No bad medicine?'

'There was no contretemps,' my aunt said. 'Oh gracious, Henry, you haven't forgotten your parcel?'

'No, no, I have it here.'

'I think perhaps Wordsworth had better put it in the refrigerator.'

'Quite unnecessary, Aunt Augusta. Ashes don't deteriorate.'

'No, I suppose not. How silly of me. But let Wordsworth put it in the kitchen just the same. We don't want to be reminded all the time of my poor sister. Now let me show you my room. I have more of my Venice treasures there.'

She had indeed. Her dressing-table gleamed with them: mirrors and powder-jars and ash-trays and bowls for safety pins. 'They brighten the darkest day,' she said. There was a very large double-bed as curlicued as the glass. 'I am especially attached to Venice,' she explained, 'because I began my real career there, and my travels. I have always been very fond of travel. It's a great grief to me that my travels now are curtailed.'

'Age strikes us all before we know it,' I said.

'Age? I was not referring to age. I hope I don't look all that decrepit, Henry, but I like having a companion and Wordsworth is very occupied now because he's studying to enter the London School of Economics. This is Wordsworth's snuggery,' and she opened the door of an adjoining room. It was crowded with glass Disney figures and worse--all the grinning mice and cats and hares from inferior American cartoon films, blown with as much care as the chandelier.

'From Venice too,' my aunt said, 'clever but not so pretty. I thought them suitable, however, for a man's room.'

'Does he like them?'

'He spends very little time there,' my aunt said, 'what with his studies and everything else...'

'I wouldn't like to wake up to them,' I said.

'He seldom does.'

My aunt led me back to the sitting-room where Wordsworth had laid out three more Venetian glasses with gold rims and a jug of water with colours mingled like marble. The bottle of Black Label looked normal and out of place, rather like the only man in a dinner-jacket at a fancy-dress party, a comparison which came at once to my mind because I have found myself several times in that uncomfortable situation, since I have a rooted objection to dressing up.

Wordsworth said, 'The telephone talk all the bloody time while you not here. Ar tell them you don gone to a very smart funeral.'

'It's so convenient when one can tell the truth,' my aunt said. 'Was there no message?'

'Oh, poor old Wordsworth not understand one bloody word. Ar say to them you no talk English. They go away double quick.'

My aunt poured out larger portions of whisky than I am accustomed to.

'A little more water please, Aunt Augusta.'

'I can say now to both of you how relieved I am that everything went without a hitch. I once attended a very important funeral--the wife of a famous man of letters who had not been the most faithful of husbands. It was soon after the first great war had ended, I was living in Brighton, and I was very interested at that time in the Fabians. I had learnt about them from your father when I was a girl. I arrived early as a spectator and I was leaning over the Communion rail--if you can call it that in a crematorium chapel--trying to make out the names on the wreaths. I was the first there, all alone with the flowers and the coffin. Wordsworth must forgive me for telling this story at such length--he has heard it before. Let me refresh your glass.'

'No, no, Aunt Augusta. I have more than enough.'

'Well, I suppose I was fumbling about a little too much and I must have accidentally touched a button. The coffin began to slide away, the doors opened, I could feel the hot air of the oven and hear the flap of the flames, the coffin went in and the doors closed, and at that very moment in walked the whole grand party, Mr and Mrs Bernard Shaw, Mr H. G. Wells, Miss E. Nesbit (to use her maiden name), Doctor Havelock Ellis, Mr Ramsay MacDonald, and the widower, while the clergyman (non-denominational of course) came through a door on the other side of the rail. Somebody began to play a humanist hymn by Edward Carpenter, "Cosmos, O Cosmos, Cosmos shall we call Thee?" But there was no coffin.'

'Whatever did you do, Aunt Augusta?'

'I buried my face in my handkerchief and simulated grief, but you know I don't think anyone (except, I suppose, the clergyman and he kept dumb about it) noticed that the coffin wasn't there. The widower certainly didn't, but then he hadn't noticed his wife for some years. Doctor Havelock Ellis made a very moving address (or so it seemed to me then: I hadn't finally plumped for Catholicism, though I was on the brink) about the dignity of a funeral service conducted without illusions or rhetoric. He could truthfully have said without a corpse too. Everybody was quite satisfied. You can understand why I was very careful this morning, not to fumble.'

I looked at my aunt surreptitiously over the whisky. I didn't know what to say. 'How sad' seemed inappropriate. I wondered whether the funeral had ever really taken place, though in the months that followed I was to realize that my aunt's stories were always basically true--only minor details might sometimes be added to compose a picture. Wordsworth found the right words for me. He said, 'We must allays go careful careful at a funeral.' He added, 'In Mendeland--ma first wife she was Mende--they go open deceased person's back an they go take out the spleen. If spleen be too big, then deceased person was a witch an everyone mock the whole family and lef the funeral double quick. That happen to ma wife's pa. He dead of malaria, but these ignorant people they don know malaria make the spleen big. So ma wife and her ma they go right away from Mendeland and come to Freetown. They don wan to be mocked by the neighbours.'

'There must be a great many witches in Mendeland,' my aunt said.

'Ya'as, sure thing there are. Plenty too many.'

I said, 'I really think I must be going now, Aunt Augusta. I can't keep my mind off the mowing-machine. It will be quite rusted in this rain.'

'Will you miss your mother, Henry?'

'Oh yes...yes,' I said. I hadn't really thought about it, so occupied had I been with all the arrangements for the funeral, the interviews with her solicitor, with her bank manager with an estate agent arranging for the sale of her little house in North London. It is difficult too for a single man to know how to dispose of all the female trappings. Furniture can be auctioned, but what can one do with all the unfashionable underclothes of an old lady, the half-empty pots of old-fashioned cream? I asked my aunt.

'I am afraid I didn't share your mother's taste in clothes, or even in cold cream. I would give them to her daily maid on condition she takes everything--everything.'

'It has made me so happy meeting you, Aunt Augusta. You are my only close relative now.'

'As far as you know,' she said. 'Your father had spells of activity.'

'My poor stepmother...I shall never be able to think of anyone else as my mother.'

'Better so.'

'In a new block under construction my father was always very careful about furnishing the specimen flat. I used to think that sometimes he went to sleep in it in the afternoon. I suppose it might have been in one of those I was...' I checked the word 'conceived' in deference to my aunt.

'Better not to speculate,' she said.

'You will come one day and see my dahlias, won't you? They are in full bloom.'

'Of course, Henry, now that I have found you again I shan't easily let you go. Do you enjoy travel?'

'I've never had the opportunity.'

'With Wordsworth so occupied we might make a little trip or two together.'

'Gladly, Aunt Augusta.' It never occurred to me that she meant further than the seaside.

'I will telephone you,' my aunt said.

Wordsworth showed me to the door, and it was only outside, when I passed the Crown and Anchor, that I remembered I had left behind my little package. I wouldn't have remembered at all if the girl in the jodhpurs had not said angrily as I pushed past the open window, 'Peter can talk about nothing but cricket. All the summer it went on. Nothing but the f ucking Ashes.'

I don't like to hear such adjectives on the lips of an attractive young girl, but her words reminded me sharply that I had left all that remained of my mother in Aunt Augusta's kitchen. I went back to the street door. There was a row of bells with a kind of microphone above each of them. I touched the right one and heard Wordsworth's voice. 'Who be there?'

I said, 'It's Henry Pulling.'

'Don know anyone called that name.'

'I've only just left you. I'm Aunt Augusta's nephew.'

'Oh, that guy,' the voice said.

'I left a parcel with you in the kitchen.'

'You wan it back?'

'Please, if it's not too much trouble...'

Human communication, it sometimes seems to me, involves an exaggerated amount of time. How briefly and to the point people always seem to speak on the stage or on the screen, while in real life we stumble from phrase to phrase with endless repetition.

'A brown-paper parcel?' Wordsworth's voice asked.

'Yes.'

'You wan me bring it down right away?'

'Yes, if it's not too much...'

'It's a bloody lot of trouble,' Wordsworth said. 'Stay there.'

I was prepared to be very cold to him when he brought the parcel, but he opened the street door wearing a friendly grin.

'Thank you,' I said, with as much coldness as I could muster, 'for the great trouble you have taken.'

I noticed that the parcel was no longer sealed. 'Has somebody opened this?'

'Ar jus wan to see what you got there.'

'You might have asked me.'

'Why, man,' he said, 'you not offended at Wordsworth?'

'I didn't like the way you spoke just now.'

'Man, it's jus that little mike there. Ar wan to make it say all kind of rude things. There ar am up there, and down there ma voice is, popping out into the street where no one see it's only old Wordsworth. It's a sort of power, man. Like the burning bush when he spoke to old Moses. One day it was the parson come from St George's in the square. An he says in a dear brethren sort of voice, "I wonder, Miss Bertram, if I could come up and have a little chat about our bazaar." "Sure, man," ar say, "you wearing your dog collar?" "Why, yes," he say, "of course, who is that?" "Man," ar say, "you better put on a muzzle too before you go come up here."'

'What did he say?'

'He wen away and never come back. Your auntie laugh like h ell when ar told her. But ar didn't mean him harm. It was just old Wordsworth tempted by that little old mike.'

'Are you really studying for the London School of Economics?' I asked.

'Oh, tha's a joke your auntie makes. Ar was workin at the Grenada Palace. Ar had a uniform. Jus lak a general. She lak ma uniform. She stop an say, "Are you the Emperor Jones?" "No, ma'm," I say, "arm only old Wordsworth." "Oh," she say, "thou child of joy, shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy shepherd boy." "You write that down for me," ar say. "It sound good. Ar like it." Ar say it over and over. Ar know it now good lak a hymn.'

I was a little confused by his garrulity. 'Well, Wordsworth,' I said, 'thank you for all your trouble and I hope one day I shall see you again.'

'This here mighty important parcel?'

'Yes. I suppose it is.'

'Then ar think you owe a dash to old Wordsworth,' he said.

'A dash?'

'A CTC.'

Remembering what my aunt had told me, I went quickly away.

Just as I had expected my new lawn-mower was wet all over: I dried it carefully and oiled the blades before I did anything else. Then I boiled myself two eggs and made a cup of tea for lunch. I had much to think about. Could I accept my aunt's story and in that case who was my mother? I tried to remember the friends my mother had of her own age, but what was the good of that? The friendship would have been broken before my birth. If indeed she had been only a stepmother to me, did I still want to place her ashes among my dahlias? While I washed up my lunch I was sorely tempted to wash out the urn as well into the sink. It would serve very well for the home-made jam which I was promising myself to make next year--a man in retirement must have his hobbies if he is not to age too fast--and the urn would have looked quite handsome on the tea table. It was a little sombre, but a sombre jar was well suited for damson jelly or for blackberry-and-apple jam. I was seriously tempted, but I remembered how kind my stepmother had been to me in her rather stern way when I was a child, and how could I tell that my aunt was speaking the truth? So I went out into the garden and chose a spot among the dahlias where the plinth could be built.

CHAPTER FOUR

I was weeding the dahlias, the Polar Beauties and the Golden Leaders and the Requiems, when my telephone began to ring. Being unused to the sound which shattered all the peace of my little garden, I assumed that it was a wrong number. I had very few friends, although before my retirement I boasted a great many acquaintances. There were clients who had stayed with me for twenty years, who had known me in the same branch as clerk, cashier and manager, and yet they remained acquaintances. It is rare for a manager to be promoted from the staff of a branch in which he will have to exercise authority, but there were special circumstances in my case. I had been acting manager for nearly a year owing to my predecessor's illness, and one of my clients was a very important depositor who had taken a fancy to me. He threatened to remove his custom if I did not remain in charge. His name was Sir Alfred Keene: he had made a fortune in cement and my father, having been a builder, gave us an interest in common. He would invite me to dinner at least three times a year and he always consulted me on his investments, though he never took my advice. He said it helped him to make up his mind. He had an unmarried daughter called Barbara who was interested in tatting, which I think she must have given to the church bazaar. She was always very kind to me, and my mother suggested I might pay her attentions, for she would certainly inherit Sir Alfred's money, but the motive seemed to me a dishonest one and in my case I have never been greatly interested in women. The bank was then my whole life, and now there were my dahlias.

Unfortunately Sir Alfred died a little before my retirement, and Miss Keene went to South Africa to live. I was intimately concerned, of course, with all her currency difficulties: it was I who wrote to the Bank of England for this permit or that and reminded them constantly that I had received no reply to my letters of the 9th ult.; and on her last night in England, before she caught her boat at Southampton, she asked me to dinner. It was a sad occasion without Sir Alfred, who had been a very jovial man, laughing immoderately even at his own jokes. Miss Keene asked me to look after the drinks and I chose an Amontillado, and for dinner Sir Alfred's favourite Chambertin. The house was one of those big Southwood mansions surrounded by rhododendron bushes which dripped that night with the steady slow November rain. There was an oil painting of a fishing boat in a storm after Van de Velde over Sir Alfred's place at the dining-room table, and I expressed the hope that Miss Keene's voyage would be less turbulent.

'I have sold the house as it stands with all the furniture,' she told me. 'I shall live with second cousins.'

'Do you know them well?' I asked.

'I have never seen them,' she said. 'They are once removed. We have only exchanged letters. The stamps are like foreign stamps. With no portrait of the Queen.'

'You will have the sun,' I encouraged her.

'Do you know South Africa?'

'I have seldom been out of England,' I said. 'Once when I was a young man I went with a school friend to Spain, but my stomach was upset by the shell-fish--or perhaps it was the oil.'

'My father was a very overpowering personality,' she said. 'I never had friends--except you, of course, Mr Pulling.'

It is astonishing to me now how nearly I came to proposing marriage that night and yet I refrained. Our interests were different, of course--tatting and dahlias have nothing in common, unless perhaps they are both the interests of rather lonely people. Rumours of the great bank merger had already reached me. My retirement was imminent, and I was well aware that the friendships I had made with my other clients would not long survive it. If I had spoken would she have accepted me?--it was quite possible. Our ages were suitable, she was approaching forty and I would soon be half-way through the fifth decade, and I know my mother would have approved. How different everything might have been if I had spoken then. I would never have heard the disturbing story of my birth, for she would have accompanied me to the funeral and my aunt would not have spoken in her presence. I would never have travelled with my aunt. I would have been saved from much, though I suppose I would have missed much too. Miss Keene said, 'I shall be living near Koffiefontein.'

'Where is that?'

'I don't really know. Listen. It's raining cats and dogs.'

We got up and moved into the drawing-room for coffee. There was a Venetian scene copied from Canaletto on the wall. All the pictures in the house seemed to represent foreign parts, and she was leaving for Koffiefontein. I would never travel so far, I thought then, and I wished that she was staying here, in Southwood.

'It seems a very long way to go,' I said.

'If there was anything to keep me here.... Will you take one lump or two?'

'No sugar, thank you.' Was it an invitation for me to speak? I have always asked myself since. I didn't love her, and she certainly didn't love me, but perhaps in a way we could have made a life together. I heard from her a year later; she wrote, 'Dear Mr Pulling, I wonder how Southwood is and whether it's raining. We are having a beautiful sunny winter. My cousins have a small (!) farm of ten thousand acres and they think nothing of driving seven hundred miles to buy a ram. I am not quite used to things yet and I think often of Southwood. How are the dahlias? I have given up tatting. We lead a very open air existence.'

I replied and gave her what news I could, but I had retired by then and was no longer at the centre of Southwood life. I told her of my mother's failing health and how the dahlias were doing. There was a rather gloomy variety in royal purple called Deuil du Roy Albert which had not been a success. I was not sorry. It was an odd name to give a flower. My Ben Hurs were flourishing.

I had neglected the telephone, feeling so sure that it was a wrong number, but when the ringing persisted, I left my dahlias and went in.

The telephone stood on the filing cabinet where I keep my accounts and all the correspondence which my mother's death caused. I had not received as many letters as I was receiving now since I ceased to be manager: the solicitor's letters, letters from the undertaker, from the Inland Revenue, the crematorium fees, the doctor's bills, National Health forms, even a few letters of condolence. I could almost believe myself a businessman again.

My aunt's voice said, 'You are very slow to answer.'

'I was busy in the garden.'

'How was the mowing-machine by the way?'

'Very wet, but no irreparable damage.'

'I have an extraordinary story to tell you,' my aunt said. 'I have been raided by the police.'

'"Raided"...by the police?'

'Yes, you must listen carefully for they may call on "you."'

'What on earth for?'

'You still have your mother's ashes?'

'Of course.'

'Because they want to see them. They may even want to analyse them.'

'But Aunt Augusta...you must tell me exactly what happened.'

'I am trying to, but you continually interrupt with unhelpful exclamations. It was midnight and Wordsworth and I had gone to bed. Luckily I was wearing my best nightdress. They rang the bell down below and told us through the microphone that they were police officers and had a warrant to search the flat. "What for?" I asked. Do you know, for a moment I thought it might be something racial. There are so many rules now for races and against races that you don't know where you stand.'

'Are you sure they were police officers?'

'Of course I asked to see their warrant, but do you know what a warrant looks like? For all I know it might have been a reader's ticket to the British Museum library. I let them in, though, because they were polite, and one of them, the one in uniform, was tall and good-looking. They were rather surprised by Wordsworth--or perhaps it was the colour of his pyjamas. They said, "Is this your husband, ma'm?" I said, "No, this is Wordsworth." The name seemed to ring a bell with one of them--the young man in uniform--who kept on glancing at him surreptitiously, as though he were trying to remember.'

'But what were they looking for?'

'They said they had reliable information that drugs were kept on the premises.'

'Oh, Aunt Augusta, you don't think Wordsworth...'

'Of course not. They took away all the fluff from the seams of his pockets, and then the truth came out. They asked him what was in the brown-paper package which he was seen handing to a man who had been loitering in the street. Poor Wordsworth said he didn't know, so I chipped in and said it was my sister's ashes. I don't know why, but they became suspicious of me at once. The elder, who was in plain clothes, said, "Please don't be flippant, ma'am. It doesn't exactly help." I said, "As far as my sense of humour goes, there is nothing whatever flippant in my dead sister's ashes." "A sort of powder, ma'am?" the younger policeman asked--he was the sharper of the two, the one who thought he knew the name of Wordsworth. "You can call it that if you like," I said, "grey powder, human powder," and they looked as though they had won a point. "And who was the man who received this powder?" the man in plain clothes asked. "My nephew," I said. "My sister's son." I saw no reason to go into that old story which I told you yesterday with members of the Metropolitan Police. Then they asked for your address and I gave it to them. The sharp one said, "Was the powder for his private use?" "He wants to put it amongst his dahlias," I said. They made a very thorough search, especially in Wordsworth's room, and they took away samples of all the cigarettes they could find, and some aspirins I had left in a cachet box. Then they said, "Goodnight, ma'am," very politely and left. Wordsworth had to go downstairs and open the door for them, and just before he left the sharp one said to him, "What's your first name?" "Zachary," Wordsworth told him and he went out looking puzzled.'

'What a very strange thing to have happened,' I said.

'They even read some letters and asked who Abdul was.'

'Who was he?'

'Someone I knew a very long time ago. Luckily I had kept the envelope and it was marked Tunis, February 1924. Otherwise they would have read all sorts of things into it about the present.'

'I am sorry, Aunt Augusta. It must have been a terrifying experience.'

'It was amusing in a way. But it did give me a guilty feeling...'

There was a ring from the front door and I said. 'Hold on a moment, Aunt Augusta.' I looked through the dining-room window and saw a policeman's helmet. I returned and said, 'Your friends are here.'

'Already?'

'I'll ring you back when they've gone.'

It was the first time I had ever been called on by the police. There was a short middle-aged man in a soft hat with a rough but kindly face and a broken nose and the tall good-looking young man in uniform. 'Mr Pulling?' the detective asked.

'Yes.'

'May we come in for a few moments?'

'Have you a warrant?' I asked.

'Oh no, no, it hasn't come to that. We just want to have a word or two with you.' I wanted to say something about the Gestapo, but I thought it wiser not. I led them into the dining-room, but I didn't ask them to sit down. The detective showed me an identity card and I read on it that he was Detective-Sergeant Sparrow, John.

'You know a man called Wordsworth, Mr Pulling?'

'Yes, he's a friend of my aunt's.'

'Did you receive a package from him in the street yesterday?'

'I certainly did.'

'Would you have any objection to our examining the package, Mr Pulling?'

'I most certainly would.'

'You know, sir, we could easily have obtained a search warrant, but we wanted to do things delicately. Have you known this man Wordsworth a long time?'

'I met him for the first time yesterday.'

'Perhaps, sir, he asked you as a favour to deliver that package and you seeing no harm at all in that and him being an employee of your aunt...'

'I don't know what you are talking about. The package is mine. I had accidentally left it in the kitchen.'

'The package is yours, sir? You admit that.'

'You know very well what's in the package. My aunt told you. It's an urn with my mother's ashes.'

'Your aunt has been in communication with you, has she?'

'Yes, she has. What do you expect? Waking up an old lady in the middle of the night.'

'It had only just gone twelve, sir. And so those ashes...They are Mrs Pulling's?'

'There they are. You can see for yourself. On the bookcase.'

I had put the urn there temporarily, until I was ready to bed it, above a complete set of Sir Walter Scott which I had inherited from my father. In his lazy way my father was a great reader, though not an adventurous one. He was satisfied with possessing a very few favourite authors. By the time he had read the set of Scott through he had forgotten the earlier volumes and was content to begin again with "Guy Mannering." He had a complete set too of Marion Crawford, and he had a love of nineteenth-century poetry which I have inherited--Tennyson and Wordsworth and Browning and Palgrave's "Golden Treasury."

'Do you mind if I take a look?' the detective asked, but naturally he couldn't open the urn. 'It's sealed,' he said. 'With Scotch tape.'

'Naturally. Even a tin of biscuits...'

'I would like to take a sample for analysis.'

I was becoming rather cross by this time. I said, 'If you think I am going to let you play around with my poor mother in a police laboratory...'

'I can understand how you feel, sir,' he said, 'but we have rather serious evidence to go on. We took some fluff from the man Wordsworth's pockets and when analysed it contained pot.'

'Pot?'

'Marijuana to you, sir. Likewise cannabis.'

'Wordsworth's fluff has got nothing to do with my mother.'

(This excerpt from Travels with My Aunt ends near the bottom of page 27.)

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FROM THE BOOK JACKET:

"No serious writer of [the twentieth century] has more thoroughly invaded and shaped the public imagination as did Graham Greene."
--"Time"

Described by Graham Greene as "the only book I have written for the fun of it, "Travels with My Aunt" is the story of Henry Pulling, a retired and complacent bank manager, who meets his septuagenarian Aunt Augusta for the first time at what he supposes to be his mother's funeral. She soon persuades Henry to abandon his dull suburban existence to travel "her" way--to Brighton, Paris, Istanbul, Paraguay. Through Aunt Augusta, one of Green's greatest comic creations, Henry joins a shiftless, twilight society; mixes with hippies, war criminals, and CIA men; smokes pot; and breaks all currency regulations.

Originally published in 1970, "Travels with My Aunt" gives us an intoxicating entertainment yet also confronts us with some of the most perplexing human dilemmas. This Graham Greene Centennial Edition includes a new introductory essay by Gloria Emerson.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Graham Greene, whose long life (1904--1991) nearly spanned the twentieth century, was one of its greatest novelists. Educated at Berkhamsted School and Balliol College, Oxford, he started his career as sub-editor on "The Times." He began to attract notice as a novelist with his fourth book, "Orient Express," in 1932. In 1935 he trekked across northern Liberia, his first experience of Africa, told in "Journey Without Maps." He converted to Catholicism in 1926 and reported on religious persecution in Mexico in 1938 in "The Lawless Roads," which served as background for his famous "The Power and the Glory," one of several "Catholic" novels ("Brighton Rock," "The Heart of the Matter," "The End of the Affair"). During the war he worked for the British secret service in Sierra Leone; afterward, he began wide-ranging travels as a journalist, reflected in novels such as "The Quiet American," "Our Man in Havana," "The Comedians," "Travels with My Aunt," "The Honorary Consul," "The Human Factor," "Monsignor Quixote," and "The Captain and the Enemy." As well as his many novels, Graham Greene wrote several collections of short stories, four travel books, six plays, two books of autobiography, "A Sort of Life" and "Ways of Escape," two of biography, and four books for children. He also contributed hundreds of essays and film and book reviews to "The Spectator" and other journals, many of which appear in the late collection "Reflections." Most of his novels have been filmed, including "The Third Man," which was first written as a film treatment. Graham Greene was named Companion of Honour and received the Order of Merit and many other awards.

A former journalist and war correspondent, Gloria Emerson is the author of "Winners & Losers," which received the National Book Award, and, most recently, a novel, "Loving Graham Greene."