Читать книгу Auntie Robbo - Ann Scott-Moncrieff - Страница 4

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Nethermuir was the name of Auntie Robbo's house. It was about twelve miles from Edinburgh at the foot of the hills, and had a wide view over flat lowland moor to the city and the river Forth. It was a square squat house with modest-sized windows. And it was clothed, all but its roof, in a neat jacket of ivy. It had a white wooden porch, and in front of the dining-room and drawing-room windows two white summer seats made of curly iron, and in the middle of its garden an enormous white flagstaff. You really noticed these things before the modest house—they were so staringly white. Auntie Robbo had them painted every spring; she said they made the place look shipshape.

The hills rose directly behind the house, at first in long shaggy waves of turf and then in steeps of heather. You had to start climbing as soon as you got out of the back door. A burn ran down past the house; Auntie Robbo owned the lochan from which it rose about a mile higher up. Walking over the hills was a favourite ploy with her and Hector.

One wet April afternoon they had been out since lunchtime climbing higher and higher and every now and then stopping while Auntie Robbo rested on a shooting-stick and admired the view. Not that there was much view: only the rain clouds settling low on the moor and the smudged outline of the Pentland Hills. Spring was in the air. The wet wind fanned their cheeks and whipped raincoats about their legs. It was delicious to feel the ground give squelchily beneath them and to know that it was alive and springing with the new green of the year.

On one of these halts Auntie Robbo pointed down to the main road; a car was creeping along it. From their height it looked like a fussy blue beetle.

"Look at that thing!" she said. Auntie Robbo had great scorn for most products of the machine age. "It doesn't go so fast, for all you say, Hector. There's nothing to beat a good turn-out of horse and gig."

"It's because we're so high up," said Hector. "I bet it's going forty miles an hour."

"Poof!"

"Easily—perhaps fifty."

"Well, why isn't it past and away down the road by this time? It ought to have gone in a flash." Auntie Robbo was triumphant, until she saw the reason for the car's slowness. For at that moment it nosed round off the road, up the drive, and in through their own white gate.

"Visitors!" she gasped.

"Shall we run?" suggested Hector.

"No use," she said resignedly, not without relief. "We're too high. Let's just wait here till they go away."

Visitors were few and far between at Nethermuir; Auntie Robbo and Hector did nothing to encourage them. For one thing afternoon tea—an anglo-dandified habit, Auntie Robbo called it—broke up their afternoon and disorganized the rest of their meals. Auntie Robbo never drank tea at any time and the act of having to pour it out for other people made her very cross, so cross that she would hardly say a word to her guests. Then Hector had to do all the entertaining, which consisted mainly in handing plates of bread and butter and cake, and submitting to pats on the head and advice about the school he must go to. No, visitors weren't popular with Auntie Robbo and Hector.

Still, they quite welcomed this strange car, since they were safe from its occupants. And it was pleasant, drawing breath high up on the wet hillside, to speculate who it might be.

"The minister?" said Auntie Robbo.

"No, he was here for dinner last week. That ought to have settled him. Besides he comes on his bicycle," said Hector. "It might be that soldier with the red moustaches—you know, he told us stories."

"Cousin Bill? No, he's in India."

"Mrs. Agnew." Hector pulled a face.

"No, she doesn't like us now."

They had exhausted their list of possibilities.

"Whoever it is," said Hector, "they're waiting. They haven't come out again."

"Oh, dear. Shall we start going down very slowly? I suppose we ought."

They started downhill at a snail's pace, looking anxiously for the reappearance of the car; but it remained parked out of sight in front of the house. Soon Hector was racing ahead, plunging and leaping down the slope. Once he tripped and curled over and over in the drenched heather. He waited for Auntie Robbo at the top of the back garden, and they went soberly together towards the house.

"I hope Amy has given them tea," muttered Auntie Robbo, "then I shan't have to pour out. Now, s-s-sh." She lifted the sneck of the back door and they crept into the lobby.

Amy bustled out of the kitchen. She was a very neat and competent parlour-maid. She had come to them from Mrs. Agnew's and she had, according to Auntie Robbo, "no sense of humour." She did in fact disapprove of Auntie Robbo and Hector; especially Hector—she wasn't so afraid of him.

She looked down her nose now when Auntie Robbo, grimacing and waving wet arms in the direction of the drawing-room, hissed: "Who is it and what do they want?"

"Who is it?" hissed Hector, hopping from one leg to the other.

Amy replied loudly and primly: "Miss Benck has arrived, ma'am. She's having tea in the drawing-room."

"Oh!" Their faces went blank with horror.

"Merlissa Benck! Bless me, Hector, she's come. It's the Egyptian stepmother. Is this really the tenth of the month? I would never have believed it. How awful of us!"

"Shall I get the spare room ready, ma'am?" asked Amy.

"Yes, do."

"Is she black?" asked Hector. He had begun to hop again in excitement.

Amy gave him a withering look, and turned on her heel.

"Come on, Hector." Auntie Robbo swept forward, shedding wet garments as she passed through the hall and into the drawing-room.

Hector followed more slowly, taking time over peeling off his raincoat. He liked to savour the excitement of meeting Merlissa Benck in advance. He went and washed his hands. An Egyptian stepmother! That was something to get excited about. He applied a brush to his rain-soaked hair with great enthusiasm. Then, plastered and neat and clean, he walked towards the drawing-room, smiling in anticipation.

As soon as he rounded the big painted screen that guarded the door, he stopped dead. The smile remained fixed on his face, but stupidly, and his legs would not carry him forward.

"So this is little Hector!" trilled a high feminine voice. A rush of steps from the hearth rug and he found himself clutched to an ample fur-clad bosom; it smelled of dead animal and potpourri and moth balls.

"But of course it is, the darling—the very image of his father."

Hector found himself pushed out at arm's length and surveyed; Merlissa Benck's eyes were cold and round and yellowish-grey, like a couple of Scots pebbles, the uglier kind of Scots pebbles, or perhaps the kind that is made uglier because of their setting. Hector stared back into these eyes as if he had been a rabbit come face to face with a stoat. Not that Merlissa Benck was like a stoat really; she was certainly not like an Egyptian. She was a fat dumpy sort of a woman; she seemed to be short of breath; her face was round and creeshy and white—whiter than the back of a floury bannock. She wasn't even healthily tanned. In fact, the Egyptian sun, far from improving her face as might have been expected, seemed to have drained away all its natural colour, leaving it flat, insipid, dead white. She had glistening white china teeth. They were set in rubber-red sockets; they weren't pretty. She had some yellow hair, very nicely curled.

Hector gulped, trying to swallow his horrible disappointment.

"How do you do?" he managed to say at last.

And Merlissa Benck again hugged him, and pushed him from her, and hugged him again.

"Perhaps you'd like to finish tea," came Auntie Robbo's voice.

Hector was released.

"Oh, yes, of course," said Merlissa Benck. "I do love my tea. Aren't you having any?"

"Never touch the stuff," said Auntie Robbo. She was standing in front of the fire, drying the bedraggled ends of her long tweed skirt. She swayed aggressively now. "Never touch it. Tans the stomach."

Hector looked hard at her. He could see she was going to be difficult. Of course she was disappointed too, but it was silly to be rude to Merlissa Benck—she might be quite nice really. He grabbed a plate of bread and butter and held it out to the guest.

"The cake, darling. Thank you. Yes, Miss Sketheway, I have heard it does that to some people," said Merlissa Benck. "At your age I suppose one has to be careful."

Hector watched Auntie Robbo anxiously. She placed her broad freckled hands on her hips and visibly swelled with wrath. She looked twice as strong, twice as healthy as Merlissa Benck; no one would have taken her for twice as old, which she was. Still, thought Hector, there was no need to show off about it, not now anyway. And just as the pent-up abuse was about to burst from Auntie Robbo...

"Of course you're absolutely marvellous for your age, aren't you?" cooed Merlissa Benck. "I can hardly believe you're over seventy."

Auntie Robbo collapsed like a pricked balloon. She could not resist saying: "Over eighty," and then she bit her lip angrily.

Hector smiled at her. No one else would have dared to do such a thing at such a moment, but Auntie Robbo and Hector understood each other well. She smiled back, wryly and apologetically.

"Your stepmother is English, Hector," she said. It was by way of a private explanation. Something in her tone nettled Merlissa Benck, though she couldn't think why. Surely it was a compliment she was being paid.

"Well, I have some good Scots blood in me too," she laughed.

"Don't apologize," said Auntie Robbo with a magnificent wave of her hand. "Don't apologize."

Merlissa Benck stopped in the act of biting her cake. She stared doubtfully at her hostess.

"We were expecting you to be different," Hector hastened to say. Auntie Robbo could be very rude about the English. "We made sure you would be Egyptian."

"Coloured?" cried Merlissa Benck in a shocked voice, and she was so incensed that actually a little colour did creep into her cheeks.

"Yes," said Auntie Robbo.

"A little coloured," said Hector. "By the sun, you know."

Merlissa Benck laughed in a relieved voice; Hector laughed politely; Auntie Robbo laughed immoderately.

"Well," said Merlissa Benck, "I'm white and proud of it; white through and through—that's how you'll find me, Hector." She patted him on the head.

There was a loud snorting explosion from Auntie Robbo's chair, a whisk of long skirts, and she had fled.

"Have some more tea," said Hector to their startled guest.