Travels with My Aunt

by Graham Greene

It was the Christians who began to carve dogs in stone in the cathedrals, and even while they were still doubtful about women’s souls they were beginning to think that maybe a dog had one,

All characters once dead, if they continue to exist in memory at all, tend to become fictions.

‘I hope you don’t plan anything illegal.’ ‘I have never planned anything illegal in my life,’ Aunt Augusta said. ‘How could I plan anything of the kind when I have never read any of the laws and have no idea what they are?’

‘Mr Visconti must have a great deal on his conscience.’ ‘Mr Visconti hasn’t got a conscience,’ my aunt said with pleasure.

I was like an outsider at some religious ceremony of which I couldn’t interpret the symbols. Even my driver left me to put his arm round another man’s shoulder, and I drank more beer to drown my sense of being excluded. I was drunk, I knew that, for drunken tears stood in my eyes, and I wanted to throw my beer glass on the floor and join the dancing. But I was excluded, as I had always been excluded. Tooley had joined her young friends and Miss Keene had departed to cousins in Koffiefontein, leaving her tatting on a chair under the Van de Velde. I would always be protected, as I had been when a cashier, by a hygienic plastic screen.

It was useless to complain of her cruelty. I had once read, in a book on Charles Dickens, that an author must not be attached to his characters, he must treat them without mercy. In the act of creation there is always, it seems, an awful selfishness. So Dickens’s wife and mistress had to suffer so that Dickens could make his novels and his fortune.

Before I left home I had rung my aunt’s number in the vain hope that she might have returned just in time for Christmas, but the bell tolled and tolled in the empty flat, and I could imagine the noise setting all the Venetian glasses atinkle.

Christmas, it seems to me, is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the flaws in our human relationships: it is the feast of failure, sad but consoling.

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.

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.