The Aunts' House

By Elizabeth Stead

Sydney, 1942Recently orphaned, Angel Martin moves into a boarding house populated by an assortment of eccentric and colourful characters. She's befriended by the gregarious Winifred Varnham a vision in exotic fabrics and the numerically gifted Barnaby Grange. But not everyone is kind and her scrimping landlady, Missus Potts, is only the beginning of Angel's troubles. Angel refuses to accept her fate and focusses her affections on her two maiden aunts. Despite their resistance, she is determined to forge a sense of belonging. Her visits to the aunts' house on the Bay soon expand her world in ways she couldn't have imagined. Elizabeth Stead brings her classic subversive wit and personal insight to this nostalgic portrait of wartime Sydney. In Angel Martin, she has created a singular and irrepressible character. A true original.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Queensland Press
• Release date: Apr 2, 2019
• ISBN: 9780702261961

Book preview

Elizabeth Stead is the Sydney-born niece of acclaimed novelist Christina Stead. From childhood, Elizabeth was greatly inspired by her grandfather David George Stead, pioneer naturalist, conservationist and storyteller. Elizabeth has published short fiction and five previous novels: The Fishcastle, The Different World of Fin Starling, The Book of Tides, The Gospel of Gods and Crocodiles and The Sparrows of Edward Street. The Aunts’ House is her sixth novel.

Bookclub notes are available at www.uqp.com.au

Also by Elizabeth Stead

The Fishcastle

The Different World of Fin Starling

The Book of Tides

The Gospel of Gods and Crocodiles

The Sparrows of Edward Street

To all I have loved.

The green place

North, north of the Sydney shore.

It was the afternoon of the day Angel Martin’s mother died. At barely ten and a half years old, Angel was escorted to Missus Potts’s boarding house. After her mother’s death she was taken from the sanitarium and ushered through what Angel thought was the gate of a sort of hell, also known as Missus Potts’s front door.

Angel had not cried. She never cried, but she sighed for the damaged and orphaned boarder she was. Angel had probably sighed when her father was murdered by a truck while riding his motorcycle on the Parramatta Road five years earlier and when her mother died of pills in the sanitarium that very day and if it had not been for Angel’s music and their colours that were constant inside her – great orchestras of it, soft or loud with the change of moods, playing in the concert hall of her brain – if it hadn’t been for that to ease her instinctive wariness, keen as something wild, and the deep dislike she felt for Missus Potts, she would have run a mile and not cared if she died too.

There was a chill in the air at this rickety, fibroed, dry-rotted and God-knows-what else, up-and-down house at the dead bottom of a steep road in the shadow of a forest. It seemed the sun was not allowed in at that time of that day, or indeed of any other day.

A mist, however, from the gully behind the house, sprayed everything with the sweet, scented oil of eucalypts and even Missus Potts couldn’t stop that small pleasure.

A green and cream sign near the letterbox said: Persia Potts’s Bushland Boarding Establishment – Reasonable Rates. To Angel’s eyes the notice was very nicely done even though it probably gave the wrong impression.

‘What are you grinning at?’ demanded Missus Potts, glaring down, sweet as rust. She was a tall woman. And blemished. Rough and red from a thousand dishes washed and Monday washdays stirring a steaming copper, hot as a branding iron that left its marks on her.

‘The mist – did you notice the mist from the trees, Missus Potts – winding its way through those branches like chimney smoke? Is there a fireplace inside the house?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous! Fires cost money – and stop grinning. How can you grin with your mother dead?’

‘It’s not on purpose. It’s the trees. It’s the green and something I can hear.’

And so, this strange child was taken in reluctantly by Missus Potts, who saw her as something inherited through trickery and lack of better judgement. A waif whose spirit was as hard as the steel of her spine.

Not once did Angel think of herself as an orphan even though it was true. Inside her being – every inch of it – was her music and the colours of the earth and the sky and the sea and choirs of thousands singing, just like Saturday afternoon at the pictures. Always something to hear and see outside and inside her. Angel Martin was never alone.

‘I can’t believe this has happened,’ Missus Potts said, over and over, crushing Angel’s small-fisted hand in her own and dragging her up to the front door of her establishment. ‘It’s like getting last prize in a raffle – a girl not right in the head.’

‘I can’t help it.’

‘You’ll have to pay your way, girl. What can you do?’

‘There’s my music. I listen to the music inside me and its colours but I can do other things.’

‘I bloody well hope so – music inside you? Colours? God Almighty, what am I stuck with here?’

‘Well, I’m stuck with you, too!’ Angel Martin snapped back through lips pressed tight together and a determined look in her dry eyes. Fierce. Unafraid. ‘And God Almighty, I don’t want that either.’

‘You mind yourself, girl!’ And Missus Potts slapped the side of Angel’s head.

It was towards the end of August in 1942 and another war to end all wars was in full swing. Angel was unaware that Australia’s finest were being stuffed down gun barrels, into aircraft and ships at the press of a foreign general’s button and sent to die in places they had never heard of. She was aware, however, of women weeping over telegrams and slept, like the rest of Sydney, in uneasy darkness as Japanese submarines, quiet as grey, scaleless fish, cruised through the ocean and on through the north and south sandstone Heads and without warning shelled the harbour.

Along the ruined shorelines, people who had never been so close to a war were outraged and afraid. Women, lined up like extra palings on the rows of picket fences lining the backyards of countless terrace houses, gossiped about the invasion. Hotels were similarly crammed with labourers and wharfies doing nothing of the sort, solving the problems of the warring world over slopping schooners.

The assault resulted in trenches being dug near the toilet block at the back of the local public school Angel Martin was forced to attend. Angel loved the unfamiliar excitement of it all, even when a boy in fourth class fell into one and broke his elbow. There were impromptu war drills when, at barely a moment’s notice, students had to practise diving under their desks as if that would save them if a bomb was dropped. Angel told the teachers what she thought about this plan and had her knuckles caned. Boys from fourth to sixth class learned about tanks and guns, while the girls were taught to knit thick woollen scarves and socks and to turn heels for brave Australian soldiers fighting the Japanese in the tropics, even though their efforts and the dye caused serious skin rashes and probably did more harm than good.

Windows were blacked out with sticky paper and the night sky, unused to anything but the stars and moon, became blacker than itself with bat-like flocks of Lancaster bombers on their way north to kill people they’d never met.

It was an anxious earth that spun at that time and it seemed that even the sun and moon were unsure whether to shine or not. Children everywhere missing their fathers tried to make sense of it all by playing war games. On the harbour, rivers and in sailing clubs, yachts that once fluttered across the water – white and quick as cabbage moths – put their masts to rest and hid their sails by order of the Navy. Food, of course, was rationed as part of The War Effort so women experimented in their kitchens and farmed vegetables in backyards.

Angel overheard talk about foreign countries in ruins and even oceans on fire. In just a few weeks, everything changed. Angel remembered one day seeing a man in a tram read something in his newspaper, blow his nose and wipe his eyes with a cloth.

An unusual friendship

Angel Martin’s mother had not known Missus Potts very well, but well enough and long enough, it seemed, to bequeath Angel to her just in case. Angel was told that she mustn’t be afraid; however, as things were at the time she thought things couldn’t get much worse and really did not care one way or the other – most of the time she tried not to think at all. Angel had heard talk at school about dirt-poors who were ‘boarded out’ because they’d been abandoned but she hoped saying that she was ‘bequeathed’ would make her a cut above, even though there were those who were not fooled. Angel hated it all but tried not to think about it. In any case, her head was so crowded with symphonies, their colours and orchestras, it was difficult to fit another single thought in.

On one very particular day in a room in the sanitarium it was explained to her that if anything happened – and it was obvious that it was happening – she was to be a strong little girl and dear, kind Missus Potts would take her in.

Angel thought her mother had never looked so pretty and serene as she lay there. She was told it was quite common for people to look beautiful at the end but a curtain was drawn around the death bed in case the sight of dying be offensive to a passer-by.

On that particular day Angel didn’t cry – Angel couldn’t cry. She could not remember the last time. In fact, she grinned in her strange way – in her sharp, small-teeth way and her half-lidded eye way, almost feline, sharp as darts, but somehow pretty with it – and told her dying mother not to worry about her and she kissed her cheek and tried to make light of things by remarking that Missus Potts ‘taking her in’ sounded like she was a dress that didn’t fit.

Angel told Missus Potts that her mother sewed very well and could knit anything. ‘That’s why I said that, about the dress.’ But the praise was sadly too late for her mother.

‘You’re a fierce child and very, very strange.’ Missus Potts stood behind Angel, eyes dry with grief and not a little put-out since she’d discovered that the bequeathed child had not a thing in the world to offer. Not what she’d expected at all.

Missus Potts had always thought Angel’s mother – a petite, neat woman – had the sort of class that only came from old money. It might have been her brooch – a small circle of pearls worn on the left shoulder of a dress that had seen better days but was never-the-less of quality fabric and well-cut – or it could have been the way she bobbed her salt-and-pepper hair or her ivory skin with its touch of honey or how she moved and the almost regal way she held a purse in her left hand ready to shake with the right.

Missus Potts had met Angel’s mother on at least eight occasions on the bus seat outside the grocery store. Angel’s mother was always interested in Missus Potts and her boarding house and she never talked about herself – in the way of ladies.

‘Here, let me put that basket on the seat, dear. You don’t want to spoil those nails – where do you get them done?’ Missus Potts said, silking up. She knew one from another, did Missus Potts. She could tell class. She paid attention. Her eyes could study microbes without her glasses.

‘You are so kind.’

‘Where do you live, dear? I’ll help you home if you like.’ Missus Potts always dusted the bus seat for her.

‘O, there’s no need. Here’s the bus now.’

And so it was that Missus Potts had no idea that home was the sanitarium and this lady had been allowed out on those days to do a little shopping and keep in touch with the world. In fact, Missus Potts had no idea at all when she’d agreed to take the lady’s sweet Angel and all that she owned in to her boarding house.

‘You are kind, Missus Potts. Angel and I have been through a difficult time. I have wondered what kindness brought us together. It’s such a delight to have a supportive friend. Angel is a clever girl and will help you, I’m sure. What we have to give is not a great deal, but the silver is nice and there is a little money.’

‘I like silver. I’ve always fancied a bit of silver. There’s something about silver even if it is a bloody pest to keep clean pardon the language but of course you’ve never had to worry about cleaning silver or anything else, have you?’ And as far as Missus Potts was concerned the deal was done right there on the bus seat – Lady-side dusted.

Angel intensely disliked Missus Potts. From the first meeting on the bus seat Angel could see difficulties, and from one look to the other, knew it was mutual. She didn’t say so but it must have shown. And there she was at the sanitarium, this big, awful woman moving from one foot to the other with something like impatience and boredom in a room beside a bed with a curtain around it. She kept lifting her wrist and glancing at it as though she owned a watch.

‘I think she’s gone, now. Dear O dear, I think we’ve lost her this time,’ Missus Potts said while a nurse pulled a sheet over Angel’s mother’s face and Missus Potts put on her jacket and the leftover grapes back into a paper bag.

‘We have not lost her! She’s right there on the bed. Are you blind?’ Angel almost screamed. ‘How can you lose dead people when they’re right in front of you? You know where they are. They don’t run away and hide, Persia Potts! She’s right there. Dead as dead!’

‘Never mind the Persia – it’s Missus Potts to you. What a bloody monster of a child you are!’

Angel brushed the remark aside – she’d heard worse. But she knew she must have looked monstrous – awful – standing there with her bag o’ bones body, straight and thin and tight as a spring, a brown haystack of hair, fists clenched by the side of an old skirt with its hem down (for it had been a long time since her mother had sewn), and bare feet with toenails chipped while she’d waited for a death and to be taken in like a dress.

‘What are you chewing?’ Potts said in the corridor. ‘Is that gum?’

‘No.’

‘What then?’

‘My hair. It tastes of salt.’

‘Well, stop it! It gives me the creeps and you could at least have worn something on those feet.’

‘Haven’t got any shoes.’

‘Well, I’m not buying shoes. I’ve got enough on my plate and there’s nothing on yours!’ And Missus Potts paused for a moment and glared at Angel. ‘Haven’t I been taken for a fool! Here, get your mother’s bag and yours. I’ve got things to do. Whoever named you Angel made a serious mistake!’

‘It was my father,’ she replied, letting her mother off the hook.

Persia Potts’s Bushland Boarding Establishment was at the bottom of Duffy Street. The fortress of blue gums and eucalypts around it kept it in shadows the sun couldn’t penetrate no matter how hard it tried. The gully behind it all, Angel was told, had a creek with water clear as a mountain spring running through it, with ferns and moss and brambles and a bushland full of birds tuning up. She imagined escaping forever through the forest’s filtered light to this world of wild beauty.

‘Can anyone walk through the gully, Missus Potts?’

‘Yes. It’s nice enough for some,’ she said, ‘but it’s nothing but a fire hazard for me. Now, get yourself inside. I’ve got tea to get ready.’

‘I’ll help.’

‘You’re going to be doing a lot of helping, Angel Martin.’

Inside, the house was crammed with small rooms, and outside bits were snapped off like broken biscuits. The whole place was in dire need of repair and was about as welcoming as a crypt.

‘Where I’m going to fit you in I don’t know!’ said kind Missus Potts. ‘I suppose I’ll just have to make the best of it with you and wipe your feet, there’s mud! And stop chewing your hair.’

‘I can’t. I’ve tried but I can’t. I don’t chew my fingernails …’

‘It wouldn’t surprise me.’

There’d been boarders’ complaints about holes in the mosquito nets over the beds so Missus Potts mentioned Angel’s hair chewing to the chemist while she bought calamine lotion for the bites.

‘Kids do a lot of crazy things – I’d leave things be – maybe she’ll get over it. Could be trouble if you try to stop her.’

‘She gives me the creeps – she’s not at all like her mother.’

‘Now there was a proper sweetheart,’ said the chemist.

Duffy Street was a terrible hill to climb to the school bus and the shops – even the milkman’s horse was afraid to clop to the bottom in case he slipped and so the milkman had to meet his customers halfway with supplies. The only human who could stride up the slope, no trouble, was the blacksmith on his way to his workshop. At seven each morning he took off fit as a brick on his strong legs. But the gully at the back of the house made up for the hill, and a lot more besides. Angel, after she’d explored and discovered, felt untouched and comforted by it. With newspapers wrapped around her legs for protection, Angel picked through brambles for berries, wandered in and out of ferns and sat by the creek with its rocks of impossibly green, soft moss and watched as the maidenhair ferns licked the surface of the sweet water and the red-breasted parrots honeymooned in the lower shrubs, with kingfishers a little higher and the ravens lauding it over the lot from nests in their blue gum towers.

Angel hid in the gully like one of its wild things and was stroked by it, there there, when something she thought must have been the edge of grief and loneliness left a cloud that even dulled the constant music that played inside her. There she found protection beneath the tree canopies and serenity, sweet as a kiss, from the gentle flow of the creek. The gully became Angel’s sanctuary and it took her in its arms and seemed to know. On one particular day it was ready for her.

On a day that Angel thought must be the worst day of the worst year in all of history, Mister Daisyfield, who was the headmaster of her local school, slipped his hand down the back of her bloomers on the stairwell where the light was broken and probed around her as though he’d lost something.

Angel didn’t tell anyone because she knew she would not have been believed but when she ran away she knew she’d kill anyone else who did that but then Mister Canning had done more or less the same thing in the upstairs hall of the boarding house and she was surprised she let him get away with little more than a punch and a spit. She’d been warned he was a terrible old bugger.

Angel had never taken an interest in hands and their fingers but she was fascinated after the events in the stairwell and hall with the hands that had touched and probed. Mister Daisyfield’s were long as a skeleton’s but with spatula fingers and white, neat nails at the end of them and Mister Canning’s had blue veins like ropes all the way down to his stubs with their dirty nails. She wondered if it would be wise to study hands and fingers so she could know them well enough to judge if their owners were good or bad.

I will think about this carefully, Angel said to Angel. I wonder what the music for hands will be? I know the colours – black – dark brown spider hairs and ugly and she carefully listened to the music inside her for help or a clue but the current offering was unchanged and into its second movement.

Persia Potts’s boarders mostly referred to her as Pottsy, but only in the privacy of their minds or in whispers.

There were five boarders (six if one counted Angel Martin). Four were permanent and others came and went. There was always a room (if you could call it that) waiting for a casual. Some boarded for the house’s proximity to the sanitarium but most who found themselves at Persia Potts’s Bushland Boarding Establishment were like lost souls with barely two pennies to rub together. Like ghosts, they were, floating in and out. Always hungry. Tramps in their way, for a night or a bludging day. They went out as skinny as they came in and, for a reason Angel could not possibly have explained, she always tip-toed, ssshhh, past their rooms, as a sign of respect for the lost.

One of the permanents was Mister Barnaby Grange. Barnaby was from Suffolk, not far from London, and had the pale complexion and hair of an Englishman. He was very tall, and seemed to be a nice man who, when asked his age, simply said ‘five eight’. He didn’t bother anyone and was always scribbling and solving mathematical equations, calculations, problems and theories about everything he saw. Barnaby Grange reminded Angel of an alabaster sculpture of a man she had once seen in a book – pale, a little fragile, with a head clearly full of lines and wires and connections and a heart that delicately pumped when it was necessary to do so. His jacket was crumpled and a little worn at the cuffs but, as Missus Potts had observed once: Quality is quality, even if it’s scuffed.

‘And see how his shoes are always clean. The Kiwi’s smudged a bit as though he’s not used to doing shoes himself – well, he wouldn’t be would he, where he comes from. His family pay well to look out for him – not like some. And close to the sanitarium if he ever needed it.’

‘Is he royal?’

‘Not far off so you be good-mannered around him, Angel Martin, and don’t chew your hair in front of him.’

Angel studied Mister Grange’s pale, clever hands, never without a pencil in the right one and notepad in the left, and felt quite safe to be near them. He wrote in numbers, spoke in numbers, numbered his days and all he observed. He probably dreamed in numbers, she imagined. Inside his jacket was a pocket watch. His father had given it to him, she was told. The watch was gold with wings beautifully engraved on it and it ticked exactly an hour slow. Missus Potts once asked, Why the wings? and Mister Grange answered in his quiet way, for he rarely spoke in words at all, To make time fly.

Missus Potts told Angel he was what they called a remittance man – more often than not they were mad geniuses sent out from the Mother Country by their toffee-nosed families who didn’t want to be embarrassed by them.

‘But left to themselves, harmless in their way,’ she said. ‘And there’s no trouble with paying, like I said, not like some,’ which was of course aimed at Angel. A bull’s eye.

Barnaby Grange did