Athena Read Online Free PDF Page B

and shut the door and ushered me down the stairs and out into the day, saying,
There there, it is all a mistake, you have come to the wrong place, and besides your aunt is dead
. I thought with panicky longing of the blue sea and the sky out there, those swaying, sentinel trees. That’s me all over, forever stepping unwillingly into oneplace while wishing for another. I had the impression, and have it still despite the evidence of later experience, that the room was huge, a vast, white, faintly humming space at the centre of which Aunt Corky lay tinily trapped on the barge of a big high bed, adrift in her desuetude. She had been dozing and at my approach her eyes clicked open as if the lids were controlled by elastic. In my first glimpse of her she did that trick that people do when you have not seen them for a long time, thrusting aside a younger and now not very convincing double and slipping deftly into its place. She lay still and stared at me for a long moment, not knowing, I could see, who I was or whether I was real or a figment. In appearance she seemed remarkably little changed since the last time I had seen her, which must have been thirty years before. She was wrinkled and somewhat shrunken and had exchanged her dyed hair for an even more startlingly lutescent wig but otherwise she was unmistakably Aunt Corky. I don’t know why this should surprise me but it did, and even made me falter for a second. Without lifting her head she suddenly smiled and said, ‘Oh, I would not have recognised you!’ Did I ever describe to you Aunt Corky’s smile? She opened her eyes wide and peeled her lips back from a set of dentures that would have fitted a small horse, while her head very faintly trembled as if she were quaking from the strain of a great though joyous physical effort. A mottled hand scrabbled crabwise across the sheet and searched in space for mine; I grasped her hooked fingers and held her under the elbow – what a grip she had: it was like being seized on by a branch of a dead tree – and she hauled herself upright in the bed, grunting. I did the usual business with pillows and so on, then brought a chair and sat down awkwardly with my hands on my knees; is there any natural way to sit beside a sickbed? She was wearing a not very clean white smock with short sleeves, the kind that patients are made to don for the operating theatre; I noticedbruises in the papery skin of the crook of her arm where blood must have been put in or taken out. She sat crookedly with her mouth open and gazed at me, panting a little, her unsteady smile making it seem as if she were shaking her head in wonderment. Two big tears brimmed up in her eyes and trembled on the lower lids. As ever in the presence of the distress of others I found myself holding my breath. I asked her how she was and without a trace of irony she answered, ‘Oh, but wonderful, wonderful – as you see!’
    After that, conveniently enough, there are gaps in my memory, willed ones, no doubt. I suppose we must have talked about the past, the family, my so-called life – God knows, Aunt Corky was not one to leave any chink of silence unstopped – but what I best recall are things, not words: that white smock, for instance, bleached by repeated use (how many had died in it, I wondered), an overflowing tinfoil ashtray on the bedside table, the livid smear of lipstick she hastened to put on with an unsteady hand. She was a little dazed at first, but as the anaesthetic of sleep wore off she became increasingly animated. She was annoyed to be discovered in such a state of disarray, and kept making furtive adjustments – that lipstick, a dab of face powder, a rapid tongue-test of the state of her dentures – assembling herself in flustered stages, a prima donna preparing for the great role of being what she imagined herself to be. And as the physical she became firmly established so too the old manner strongly reasserted itself, as she sat there, fully upright now,