Aunt Christina

The orangery was at the end of the house, on the garden side, and nobody went into it at night.

It was a long room of glass on an iron frame, built a hundred and twenty years ago by somebody in the family who had wanted lemons in Prussia, and it was heated by pipes under the floor that ticked and knocked like the radiator in Charlotte’s flat, and it smelled of wet earth and leaves and, faintly, at the far end, of the lemons themselves. His father had kept the trees. There were eleven of them, in square green tubs on wheels, the oldest older than the house, and his father had known each of them by its tub and its habits and had come out here in the evenings in winter with a can and a notebook, and written down how much water and how many fruit and whether the scale insects were back. Since February of last year the gardeners had kept them, very well, and nobody had written anything down.

Alexander came here at night when he wanted to be somewhere that was not his. The dome was his. His room was his. The orangery had been his father’s, and was now nobody’s, and you could sit on the bench at the far end between the two oldest tubs with the lamp off and the glass black all round you, with the reflections of the house in it, and nobody would think to look.

He had been sitting there for twenty minutes when the door at the house end opened, and closed, and somebody came down the length of the room between the tubs in the dark, slowly, as though counting them.

It was his aunt.

She was in her cardigan, with her glasses on her head and a cup in each hand, and she stopped at the end of the row of tubs and looked at him on his bench in the dark, and did not turn on the lamp.

“Your mother told me where you’d be,” she said. In German.

He had heard her speak German at supper on Saturday, to Lukas, and to his mother in the hall. He had not heard her speak it to him. It was a soft German, southern, with the corners worn off, nothing like his mother’s, which was Hanoverian and exact, or his own, which was Berlin and was, Lukas said, the German of a boy who had learned it from ministers.

“She knows everything,” said Alexander. In German.

“She knows where you sit when you are unhappy,” said his aunt. “That is not the same as everything. It is a great deal more useful.” She held out one of the cups. “Your mother says you will not drink cocoa unless it is too sweet. This is too sweet. I watched the woman in the kitchen make it and I did not stop her.”

He took it. It was too sweet. He held it in both hands.

His aunt sat down at the other end of the bench, between him and the second-oldest tub, and held her own cup, and looked out through the black glass at nothing, at the reflection of the lamps in the house.

Neither of them said anything for a while. He realised, sitting there, that in fifteen years of weddings and christenings and funerals, of standing beside her in rows and sitting across from her at long tables, he had never once been alone with her in a room, and had never once had a conversation with her that was not, in some way, about somebody else.

“I want to tell you which page it was,” said his aunt.

---

“It began with your birthday,” she said. “This is the answer to your birthday letter. That was the first line. I thought it was Frederick’s homework. I thought it was something for English, a letter in the voice of somebody, the kind of thing they set at that school. I thought, how odd, he has written an answer to a birthday letter, whose birthday. And I read on, because it was in my hand and it was on my kitchen table and I am a mother, and by the time I understood, I had read nearly all of it.”

She drank some of her cocoa.

“I am not going to tell you everything that was on it. You know what was on it. You wrote it.” She held the cup in her lap. “I am going to tell you the sentence I stopped on. Not the sentence where I stopped reading. I had stopped understanding some time before. The sentence where I stopped being able to pretend I didn’t understand.” She turned her head and looked at him in the dark. “You are not my adviser. You are my cousin.”

He looked at the cocoa.

“I have thought about that sentence,” said his aunt, “more than I have thought about any paper in thirteen boxes since October. And I have thirteen boxes, Alexander. I keep them in thirteen separate places, and I read them in thirteen separate rooms, and no paper from one realm is ever opened in a room where another lies open, and I have kept that rule every day since the fourth of October, because it is your uncle’s rule, and he cannot keep it now. And I sat at my kitchen table with your letter in my hand and read that sentence, and thought: he knows. He knows exactly what he is doing and exactly what it is not. He has drawn the line in the right place. He has drawn it better than half the ministers who send me papers.” She looked back at the glass. “And then I thought: and he is fifteen, and he has had to draw it on his own, in a letter, at night, because there was nobody to draw it for him. And then I put it back in the pocket.”

“I’m sorry,” said Alexander.

“Don’t be,” said his aunt. “It was the best sentence I read that month. I just wasn’t supposed to read it.”

---

The pipes knocked under the floor. Somewhere in the house a door closed, and footsteps went along a corridor overhead, and stopped.

“May I ask you something?” said Alexander.

“You may ask me anything. I may not answer.”

“What is it like?”

She did not ask what. She knew what. He could see her know it, in the reflection in the black glass, her face going still.

“Watching him,” said Alexander. “Uncle Ernest. Since September. Frederick tells me some of it. In the letters. The trains. The six words a day. But Frederick tells me what Frederick sees. You see something else.”

His aunt was quiet for a long time.

“He did not stop all at once,” she said. “People think it is all at once. The aircraft, and then he was gone, and then he was found, and then he woke. It wasn’t like that. When he woke, he was nearly all there. He knew me. He knew Frederick. He knew where he was and why, and what day it was, and he could not find the words for most of it, but it was all there behind the words, I could see it, the way you can see a room through a window when the door is locked.” She turned the cup in her hands. “And then, over the next week, he began to stop. Not all of him. One thing at a time. The papers first. He stopped asking for the papers on the fourth day. He had asked for them every morning of his life since he was twenty-five, and on the fourth day he didn’t, and I waited, and he didn’t ask the next day either. Then the names of things. Then the telephone, which he hated anyway. Then the Sunday call, to Frederick, which he had made every Sunday at four for years and which I had thought was the last thing that would go.” She stopped. “He still listens to the trains. That has not stopped. I sit on the camp bed in the room next door some nights and hear Frederick reading them through the wall, and I think: that is the one. That is the thing that will go last.”

Alexander did not say anything.

“And then one afternoon,” said his aunt, “he decided to stop the rest. On purpose. The fourteen. He looked at what he had left and he decided that what he had left was not enough to hold fourteen Crowns properly and was enough to hold a son, and he chose the son.” She drank the last of the cocoa. “That is what it is like. It is watching the man you married put things down one at a time, the small things by accident and the large things on purpose. The accidents are worse. The ones on purpose, I can be proud of.”

---

“And now you’re Regent for Frederick,” said Alexander.

“Until the second of May.”

“Is it the same? As for Uncle Ernest?”

“No,” said his aunt at once. “It is the opposite.”

She put her cup down on the edge of the tub beside her, very carefully, between two of the lemon tree’s roots that had come up over the soil.

“When I was Regent for your uncle,” she said, “I was keeping his chair warm. That was the whole of it. He was going to come back and sit in it, and my job was to keep it exactly as he left it, so that when he came back he would find everything where he expected, the papers in the right boxes and the rules unchanged. I kept it warm for five weeks. And then he did not come back, and I understood in the hospital on the thirtieth of October that I had been keeping it warm for somebody who was not going to sit in it.”

She looked at the glass.

“Now I am keeping it for my son. And it is not warm. I am keeping it cold. I am keeping it cold so that he cannot sit in it until it is his, and so that when he sits in it on the second of May it does not feel like his mother’s chair, or his father’s. It must feel like nobody’s. Like a chair that has been waiting. So I sit in it as little as I can. I show him every paper, at the kitchen table, on Tuesdays, which you told him to ask for, so I know whom to thank. I let him have one opinion a paper. I say Antecknat. And I do not let him sit in it. Not for a minute. Not even to try.” She paused. “Your sister is doing the same for you.”

Alexander looked down at his hands round the cup.

“She doesn’t want it,” he said.

“The chair?”

“Anything. The regency. She never wanted it. She took it because there had to be somebody, and the Council was wrong, and she was the only person nobody could say was wrong. She’s doing her finals this week. She’s been doing the regency in the mornings and the bones of the hand at night.”

His aunt waited. He could feel her waiting, the way Lukas waited on the floor of the dome, without pressing, as though there were all the time in the world, and he understood that she had decided to give him the length of the bench to say it in, or not.

He did not say the thing. He said a different thing, which was true, and which he had not told anybody.

“She told me once,” he said, “about the scaphoid. It’s a bone in the wrist. Here.” He turned his left hand over in the dark and touched the place, at the base of the thumb. “It’s the one that breaks when you fall and put your hand out to save yourself. And it doesn’t hurt very much, so nobody notices it’s broken, sometimes for weeks, and you go on using the hand, and it doesn’t heal, because nobody knows to let it. She said it was her favourite bone. She said it was the only one in the body that breaks because it’s being useful.” He looked at his wrist. “I think she was telling me something. I don’t know what.”

His aunt looked at him for a long time in the dark.

“Yes, you do,” she said, quite gently.

He did not answer. She did not ask him to. She picked her cup up off the edge of the tub and held it, empty, in her lap, and they sat on the bench side by side, the Queen of Sweden and the German Emperor, in his father’s orangery, with the lemon trees round them in the dark and the pipes knocking under the floor.

---

At half past ten the footsteps came back along the corridor overhead and stopped again, and his aunt looked up at the glass roof, where there was nothing to see.

“Your mother,” she said. “She has been walking that corridor since nine. She will not come in. She thinks the orangery is yours.”

“It was my father’s.”

“Then she thinks it is his,” said his aunt, “and she will not come in for the same reason she will not climb your ladder.” She stood up. “I am going to go and tell her you have drunk the cocoa. Which you have not. You have held it for an hour. It will be cold.”

He looked at the cup. It was cold. It was full.

“I’ll drink it,” he said.

“You will not,” said his aunt. “You will pour it into the lemon tree when I have gone, and the lemon tree will have scale insects again by Whitsun, and the gardeners will not know why.” She bent and took the cup out of his hands, and held it with her own. “Give it to me. I will tell her you drank it. That is the kind of lie a Regent is allowed.”

She went to the door at the house end, between the tubs, counting them again, and at the door she stopped, with her hand on the frame and the light from the corridor behind her, and turned round, and looked at him on the bench at the far end of the room.

She said something in Swedish.

“Du får vara femton också. Det har ingen röst.”

It was short. Eight or nine words. He did not know any of them. She said it quietly, the way she had said something to Frederick in the hall the evening before that had made his ears go white, and he waited for her to say it again in German, and she did not.

“What does that mean?” said Alexander.

“Ask Frederick,” said his aunt. “He’ll tell you it means something else.” And she went out, and closed the door behind her, very gently, the way his mother closed doors, and he heard her go along the corridor, and stop, and say something in German, low, and his mother’s voice answer, and then both of them going away together towards the stairs.

He sat in the orangery alone with his father’s eleven lemon trees.

After a while he got up and went down the row to the oldest one, at the end, in the biggest tub, with its trunk as thick as his arm and twisted like a rope, and stood in front of it, and put his hands behind his back.

There was a notebook on the shelf under the glass at the end of the row, behind the watering can, where his father had always left it. He had known it was there for fourteen months and had not opened it. He took it down now, in the dark, and opened it at the last page that had writing on it, and turned on the lamp at last, and read, in his father’s hand, small and square and exactly like his own:

9 February. No. 1: watered, 2 litres. Seven fruit. Scale gone. Tell A. it was the soap.

Three days before.

He stood with the notebook open under the lamp for a long time. Then he took the pencil out of the spine, where his father had left it, and wrote underneath, in the same square hand, small:

3 April. No. 1: not watered. Fruit not counted. It was the soap. A.

And put it back behind the can, and turned off the lamp, and went to bed.