Travels with My Aunt

by Graham Greene

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 bathroom—we lived in Highgate then—and finding

my father asleep in the bath in his clothes. I am rather short-sighted 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.

Human communication, it sometimes seems to me, involves an exaggerated amount of time. How briefly and to the point people always seem to speak on the stage or on the screen, while in real life we stumble from phrase to phrase with endless repetition.

It is astonishing to me now how nearly I came to proposing marriage that night and yet I refrained. Our interests were different, of course—tatting and dahlias have nothing in common, unless perhaps they are both the interests of rather lonely people. Rumours of the great bank merger had already reached me. My retirement was imminent, and I was well aware that the friendships I had made with my other clients would not long survive it. If I had spoken would she have accepted me?—it was quite possible. Our ages were suitable, she was approaching forty and I would soon be half-way through the fifth decade, and I know my mother would have approved. How different everything might have been if I had spoken then. I would never have heard the disturbing story of my birth, for she would have accompanied me to the funeral and my aunt would not have spoken in her presence. I would never have travelled with my aunt. I would have been saved from much, though I suppose I would have missed much too. Miss Keene said, ‘I shall be living near Koffiefontein.’

Freedom, I thought, comes only to the successful and in his trade my father was a success. If a client didn’t like my father’s manner or his estimates, he could go elsewhere. My father wouldn’t have cared. Perhaps it is freedom, of speech and conduct, which is really envied by the unsuccessful, not money or even power.

I remember once when I was in Tunis a travelling company was there who were playing Hamlet in Arabic. Someone saw to it that in the Interlude the Play King was really killed—or rather not quite killed but severely damaged in the right ear—by molten lead. And who do you suppose the police at once

suspected? Not the man who poured the lead in, although he must have been aware that the ladle wasn’t empty and was hot to the touch. Oh no, they knew Shakespeare’s play too well for that, and so they arrested Hamlet’s uncle.’

‘He travelled from one woman to another, Henry, all through his life. That comes to much the same thing. New landscapes, new customs. The accumulation of memories. A long life is not a question of years. A man without memories might reach the age of a hundred and feel

that his life had been a very brief one. Your father once said to me, “The first girl I ever slept with was called Rose. Oddly enough she worked in a flower shop. It really seems a century ago.”

‘A very fat man. I don’t know why I say that, but I have always liked fat men. They have given up all unnecessary effort, for they have had the sense to realize that women do not, as men do, fall in love with physical beauty. Curran was stout and so was your father. It’s easier to feel at home with a fat man. Perhaps travelling with me you will put on a little weight yourself.

‘He died in the passage?’ I asked. ‘He died on his travels,’ my aunt said in a tone of reproof. ‘As he would have wished.’ ‘“Here he lies where he longed to be,”’ I quoted in order to please my aunt, though I couldn’t help remembering that Uncle Jo had not succeeded in reaching the lavatory door. ‘Home is the hunter, home from the sea,’ my aunt finished the quotation in her own fashion, ‘And the sailor home from the hill.’

What did the truth matter? All characters once dead, if they continue to exist in memory at all, tend to become fictions. Hamlet is no less real now than Winston Churchill, and Jo Pulling no less historical than Don Quixote.

Smuggling on such a large scale seemed more like a business coup than a crime.

‘I had never had tea in the garden between the St James and Albany before, nor had Louise, but some impulse—I sometimes believe in a Higher Power, even though I am a Catholic—led the two of us that afternoon into the garden.

The saddest thing he ever said to me was, “There’s no other St James and Albany in all Paris.” I said, “Couldn’t you take two rooms at the Ritz on different floors?” He said, “The lift man would know. It wouldn’t be really secret.”’

“All the world’s a stage”, of course, but a metaphor as general as that loses all its meaning. Only a second-rate actor could have written such a line out of pride in his second-rate calling. There were occasions when Shakespeare

was a very bad writer indeed. You can see how often in books of quotations. People who like quotations love meaningless generalizations.’

She turned on me with real fury as though I were a child who had carelessly broken some vase she had cherished over the years for its beauty and the memories it contained. ‘I despise

no one,’ she said, ‘no one. Regret your own actions, if you like that kind of wallowing in self-pity, but never, never despise. Never presume yours is a better morality. What do you suppose I was doing in the house behind the Messaggero? I was cheating, wasn’t I? So why shouldn’t Mr Visconti cheat me? But you, I suppose, never cheated in all your little provincial banker’s life because there’s not anything you wanted enough, not even money, not even a woman. You looked after people’s money like a nanny who looks after other people’s children. Can’t I see you in your cage, stacking up the little fivers endlessly before you hand them over to their proper owner? Angelica certainly brought you up as she wanted you. Your poor father didn’t have a chance. He was a cheat too, and I only wish you were. Then perhaps we’d have something in common.’

‘Are you really a Roman Catholic?’ I asked my aunt with interest. She replied promptly and seriously, ‘Yes, my dear, only I just don’t believe in all the things they believe in.’

‘He wouldn’t have died if she had not been so feeble. I am convinced of that. Your father had to be shaken into action.

‘You didn’t have the time to love him, it seems,’ my aunt said. ‘There you are quite wrong. Perhaps because you don’t know what love is. I loved him from the moment he got off the bus at Chelsea Town Hall, and I love him today. When he was dead I did everything for him—everything—there was no one else to help my poor dear—his wife

wouldn’t come. There had to be a post-mortem, and she wrote to the authorities to bury him in Boulogne—she didn’t want his poor poor mutilated body. So there was only myself and the concierge

‘That little sentimental creature? She doesn’t know what love is.’ ‘Do you?’ I asked, letting my anger out. ‘I think I have had rather more experience of it than you,’ Aunt Augusta replied with calm and careful cruelty. It was true—I hadn’t even answered Miss Keene’s last letter. My aunt sat opposite me over her sole with an air of perfect satisfaction. She ate the shrimps that went with it one by one before she tackled the sole; she enjoyed the separate taste and she was in no hurry.

‘What kind of a study group?’ ‘The problems of empire,’ he replied, staring at me with eyes enlarged and angry as though I had already made some foolish or unsympathetic reply.

‘I thought we had got rid of all those.’ ‘A temporary failure of nerve,’ he snapped and bayoneted his turkey.

had a deep conviction that I was about to find myself again in Aunt Augusta’s world, and my pulse beat with an irrational sense of pleasure. When Miss Truman brought me two mince pies I accepted them both as though I needed them to sustain me for a long voyage. I even helped myself liberally to brandy butter.

Councillor Trumbull was responsible for building the square redbrick block with barred windows in Crammer Road, which, once an orphanage, is now a detention centre for juvenile delinquents.

When his turn with the chalice came Detective-Sergeant Sparrow took a very long swig, and I noticed afterwards that more wine had to be fetched before the Communion was finished. When I returned to my seat, the detective-sergeant trod on my heels, and in the pew behind me the whispers broke out again. ‘My throat’s like a grater,’ I heard the sergeant say. I suppose he was apologizing for his performance with the chalice.

Loyalty to a person inevitably entails loyalty to all the imperfections of a human being, even to the chicanery and immorality from which my aunt was not entirely free. I wondered whether she had ever forged a cheque or robbed a bank, and I smiled at the thought with the tenderness I might have shown in the past to a small eccentricity.

There’s no such thing. When you have a child you are condemned to be a father for life. They go away from you. You can’t go away from them.’

One’s life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand. Even if we have the happy chance to fall in love, it is because we have been conditioned by what we have read, and if I had never known love at all, perhaps it was because my father’s library had not contained the right books.

I love your auntie. I wan for to stay with her like the song say: “Abide with me; fast falls the eventide; the darkness deepens: oh with me abide … Tears have not bitterness,” but man, these tears are bitter, thas for sure.’

Soldiers were goose-stepping in front of the cathedral, and a very early tank stood on a plinth up on the green sward. The orange trees were everywhere, some in fruit and some in blossom.

We sat down in the meagre shade of a banana tree. The air was sweet with orange and jasmine, and the moon swam palely in the pale blue daylight sky. It looked as worn and thin as an old coin, and the craters were the same colour as the sky, so that one seemed to be looking through holes at the universe behind. There was no sound of traffic. The clip-clop of a horse belonged to the same ancient world of silence. ‘Yes, it’s very peaceful,’ my aunt said, ‘only an occasional gunshot after dark. The police are sometimes trigger-happy. I forget whether it’s one lump or two.’

He gave a short bark which did not sound amiable at all, and at that moment, perhaps because of the heat, the sun and the scent of flowers, I was overcome by a fit of sneezing. Without thinking I drew my aunt’s red scarf from my breast pocket and blew my nose. It was most unfortunate. I found myself sitting on the pavement without knowing how I got there, and my nose streamed with blood. Fat men surrounded me, all of them in dark suits and all with faces of bulldogs. Others like them appeared on the balcony of the Colorado

house and looked down at me with curiosity and disapproval. I heard the word ‘Ingles’ repeated often, and then a policeman yanked me to my feet. Afterwards I was to think how lucky I had been; if I had blown my nose near a group of gau-chos I might well have received a knife in the ribs.

My aunt came in from the kitchen carrying the champagne. ‘And glasses,’ Mr Visconti said, ‘you have forgotten the glasses.’ I watched Aunt Augusta with fascination. I had never seen her taking orders from anyone before.

Let us finish this bottle and open another. Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie-detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie-detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully.’

Do you like him, Henry?’ she asked with an appeal which touched me under the circumstances. She was not a woman who found it easy to make an appeal. ‘It’s early for me to judge,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t seem to me very trustworthy.’ ‘If he were, would I have loved him, Henry?’

A light went on at the bottom of the garden and then was extinguished. ‘Who is it prowling there?’ I asked. ‘Mr Visconti doesn’t altogether trust his partner. He has been betrayed too often.’ I couldn’t help wondering how many he had himself betrayed; my aunt, his wife, those cardinals and princes, even the Gestapo.

Indeed I have a great fellow feeling for rats. The future of the world lies with the rat. God, at least as I imagine him, created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed—that is the meaning of evolution. One species would die out. I have never understood why Protestants object so much to the ideas of Darwin. Perhaps if he had concentrated on the evolution of sheep and goats he would have appealed to the religious sense.’ ‘But rats …’ I objected. ‘Rats are highly intelligent creatures. If we want to find out anything new about the human body we experiment on rats. Rats indeed are ahead of us indisputably in one respect—they live underground. We only began to live underground during the last war. Rats have understood the danger of surface life for thousands of years. When the atom bomb falls the

rats will survive. What a wonderful empty world it will be for them, though I hope they will be wise enough to stay below. I can imagine them evolving very quickly. I hope they don’t repeat our mistake and invent the wheel.’

‘I met a rat once in my garden,’ I said and allowed Mr Visconti to refill my glass. ‘He was standing motionless so as not to be seen in the flower-bed. His fur looked fluffy like a bird who has blown out its feathers against the cold. He wasn’t repulsive like a smooth rat. Without thinking I throw a stone at him. I missed him and I expected him to run, but instead he only limped away. One of his legs must have been broken. There was a hole in the hedge and he made for it very slowly. Once he stopped exhausted and peered over his shoulder at me. He looked rejected, and I was sorry for him. I couldn’t throw another stone. He limped on to the hole and went through it. There was a cat in the next garden and I knew he didn’t stand a chance. He had such dignity, going to his death. I felt ashamed of myself all that morning.’

‘It does you credit,’ Mr Visconti said. ‘Speaking as an honorary rat on behalf of other rats, I forgive the stone. Have another glass.’ ‘I’m not used to champagne in the morning.’

‘I think the reason lay partly in his idea of immortality, but I think too it belonged to his war against the Inland Revenue. He was a great believer in delaying tactics. “Never answer all their questions,” he would say. “Make them write again. And be ambiguous. You can always decide what you mean later according to circumstances. The bigger the file the bigger the work. Personnel frequently change. A newcomer has to start looking at the file from the beginning. Office space is limited. In the end it’s easier for them to give in.” Sometimes, if

the inspector was pressing very hard, he told me that it was time to fling in a reference to a nonexisting letter. He would write sharply, “You seem to have paid no attention to my letter of April 6, 1963.” A whole month might pass before the inspector admitted he could find no trace of it. Mr Pottifer would send in a carbon copy of the letter containing a reference which again the inspector would be unable to trace. If he was a newcomer to the district, of course he blamed his predecessor; otherwise, after a few years of Mr Pottifer, he was quite liable to have a nervous breakdown. I think when Mr Pottifer planned to carry on after death (of course there was no notice in the papers and the funeral was very quiet) he had these delaying tactics in mind. He didn’t think of the inconvenience to his clients, only of the inconvenience to the inspector.’

‘Have you never heard,’ Mr Visconti said, ‘that beer is much more intoxicating drunk through a straw?’ ‘Surely that is only a legend.’ ‘There speaks a Protestant,’ Mr Visconti said. ‘Any Catholic knows that a legend which is believed has the same value and effect as the truth. Look at the cult of the saints.’ ‘But the Americans may be Protestants.’ ‘Then we produce medical evidence. That is the modern form of the legend. The toxic effect of imbibing alcohol through a straw. There is a Doctor Rodriguez here who would help me. The statistics of cancer of the liver. Suppose we could persuade the Panama government to prohibit the sale of straws with alcoholic drink. The straws would be sold illicitly from under the counter. The demand would be tremendous. Remote danger is a great attraction. From the profits I would found the Visconti Research Institute …’ ‘But these are plastic straws.’

‘We can call them cured straws; there will be articles showing that the cure is quite useless like filters on cigarettes.’