Free Aunts Up the Cross by Robin Dalton

gaiety.
    ‘I told you, Lyndall,’ snapped Juliet, while rising, nevertheless and settling herself expectantly on her pillows, ‘that we didn’t want any breakfast.’
    ‘Well,’ said my mother, ‘in that case, you bloody well needn’t
have
any breakfast!’ and, marching to the window, with one mighty heave, she hurled the loaded tray out into the street.
    My mother suffered agonies of remorse from these outbreaks but, what with lack of sleep, lack of privacy, and constant provocation, her nerves could never weather another encounter for long. Of course, I missed a great deal of the fun when I was at school and so the few occasions when my mother literally let fly were to me gloriously explosive highlights in a situation continually smouldering with tension.

CHAPTER 7
    My mother loved flowers passionately and as we had no garden her passion found expression in arranging brimming bowls in every room. These she did exquisitely, with care and devotion, but was seldom allowed to indulge in her artistry alone. Once all the vases in the sitting-room had been filled with water and wire and the flowers freed from their wrapping, my grandmother would come in and take up her seat. On top of the chimney-piece was a deep, heavy earthenware trough, and this was always a challenge to my mother’s skill: the flowers had to be just the right length and just the right weight to balance in their wire cage. One day my grandmother was watching this intricate task and after my mother had placed each flower in its place she, talking the while, would skip forward and give the whole erection a tweak. Tight-lipped but restrained, my mother persevered, and my grandmother continued to pull a flower here and push a flower there each time she turned to the table for the next one. Finally when the whole pattern was almost complete, my grandmother pulled a flower just a shade too hard and slowly the wire cage tipped forward—the work of half an hour lying forlornly horizontal. ‘Aaaah!’ bellowed my mother, with a terrible cry of release: she grasped the heavy trough lightly at either end, and with all the force she could summon threw it intact to the ceiling. There was a splendid crash: a cascade of water, wire, flowers, pieces of pottery shot all over the room and my grandmother, seriously alarmed, went pale with fright.
    ‘Lyndall,’ she whispered, ‘I think you’ve gone mad!’
    This was an unexpected bonus in weapons and my mother seized upon it. She whirled upon my grandmother, wild-eyed.
    ‘That’s it,’ she shrieked, ‘I am! I am!’
    Battering on the wall with her fists, she raised her eyes to the dripping ceiling, ‘Mad! Mad! Mad!’
    My grandmother scurried downstairs as fast as she could, and my mother was left to regain her composure and mop up the debris in peace.
    Many of the rows were precipitated by Aunt Juliet. She was an extremely stupid woman, although, in a childish way, sometimes endearingly so. Uncle Harry had fallen through our floor a rich man, but had left his money so tied up by trusts that his silly widow had little opportunity to dissipate it, as she undoubtedly would have done. One of her few financial freedoms was a charge account at Sydney’s best department store, David Jones, which was paid monthly by the trustees. This was a recognised family preserve or, I should say, recognised by Aunt Juliet in moments of generosity or bribery and by my mother perpetually. When Aunt Juliet wished to make amends for some act of idiocy, she would tell my mother to go and buy herself something ‘on my account at David Jones’. On the other hand, whenever my mother wanted to buy something, usually for me, which she could not afford (and as the week’s housekeeping would invariably have been eaten up or gone into Tony McGill’s pocket, she could rarely afford it), she would say with a comforting and conspiratorial air, ‘Come along. We’ll put it on Aunt Juliet’s account, at David Jones.’ We had wonderful