Graham Greene - Travels with My Aunt

Travels With My Aunt

Graham Greene

PART ONE

Chapter I

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 take-over 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 bathroomwe lived in Highgate thenand finding my father asleep in the bath in his clothes. I am rather shortsighted 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 be 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 old 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 lifeher 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 rightabout 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 playor 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 got' 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.'