Work Text:
September, 1935
It was supposed to be an easy essay. To judge by the rate at which his peers were writing, it was an easy essay. Iain Blythe gave the board another cursory glance for good measure and suppressed a groan. How were they all writing like that? It was complicated. Wasn't everyone's family complicated? Helen theorised it was, and Helen was older, so ought to know.
The board ordered them to Describe your family in uninspired cursive. To what purpose, Iain wasn't clear, though he conceded ungraciously it was slightly better than the normal start-f-term order to Describe your summer. half a point to the teacher for originality. Maybe the man wanted a sense of who his new pupils were, or how they wrote. Iain picked up his experimentally, considered his page, and set it down again while around him, pen nibs scratched frenetically. In theory, he supposed, it was that easy. Iain's father was a vet, his mother on the stage and his sister a dedicated dancer, even at the tender age of three. She'd been dancing since almost before she could walk.
But that barely scratched the surface. Mam had, if Iain was going to be academic about it - see further the italicized order Describe your family - brought him up in the theatre. Iain remembered this; The musty smell of the dressing room and the plush of the cushions he nestled in. He nicked them from the storeroom, all musty velvet, and the Crown Imperial was by then too used to Iain to mind.
He was after a fashion to be the collective pet of this venerable theatre. The women his mother lived with at Evensong in another life, the one before his father, were all Auntie to Iain. He drifted from room to room inhaling hteir different perfumes - tweed for Auntie Sonia, L'heur Bleu for Mam - and learned their histories, their lines. Da said Iain breathed them in the way other people did air and second languages. Not strictly true; There were easier things than memorization, but Iain took his father's point. Not least because he could still do it. If Iain closed his eyes and blotted out the stupid injunction - Describe your family - he slipped backwards into whole scenes that hadn't been his and lived in them. We are such stuff as dreams are made of - Prospero. Helena's righteous fury. Oh spite, oh hell, I see you are all bent...He couldn't write that, and not just because it talked about places like Hell, although past experience said you couldn't talk about places like hell without strenuously upsetting teachers.
It made no sense, because Fr Emmery preached on it, and the people who wrote for his mother could invoke it, and even Aunt Faith got away with talking about it almost glibly, but if Iain so much as started to explain about it, or write about it, his knuckles vouched for this being entirely unacceptable schoolroom talk.
Somehow neither was Bella Mannwaring's terror, nor the fragile love of the schoolteacher in Autumn Crocus. Not that Iain could say why. He only knew these things were patently ridiculous, since to talk of his family was to talk of his mother, and theatre lit her up the way one only heard about in sermons. It made her radiant, otherworldly. Made her the Ariel his aunts and father called her. Somehow, Iain didn't think Mr Villiers with his ruler was going to understand about that.
So, Iain left the theatre out of it and tried to talk about Aunt Judith's house. Except that was awkward too, because she wasn't his aunt on paper, just in family mythology. Mr Villiars did not strike Iain as the type to understand family mythology. But the way the family Iain was supposed to be describing told it, all the young Blythes spent afternoons at Aunt Judith's as babies. Christopher and Helen had sat at her feet, when they weren't in the police surgery with Uncle Jem, or at the Larkrise surgery with Aunt Faith. Isobel, more lately, had slept in Aunt Judith's sunroom, curled in her Moses basket while Iain and Aunt Judith debated academically whether animals had souls. (They had.) This was the great thing about Aunt Judith; Iain could confront her with conundrums that plainly perplexed his own adults and she would undertake to answer them. On the subject of ensouled animals,
Iain recalled Aunt Judith had hummed consideration before asking, 'Tell me, are they implicated in the Fall, do you think?'
Iain had sat with his hands around Blue Italian, mindful not to let it drop, and considered this question with due weight. No, he'd said, and she had agreed, and little Nattie, bored of watching over Isobel had joined them.
'How d'you know?' she asked.
Iain hadn't, not for sure, so they'd debated that long into the evening, talking now in English, now in Gaelic, now again in Yiddish, losing and gaining Aunt Judith's input as the language of the moment allowed. It was a memory that made him smile, notwithstanding the impossibly vexed order scrolled across the blackboard. Iain only had to think on it to recall the consistency of raspberry jam, the mixed chatter of the conversation, Aunt Judith's laugh like an orchestra and the way she ribbed them for swapping languages by the sentence.
And Uncle Geordie, lazily, from his chair by the fire, 'They get that from you, my sweet.'
'Well,' said Aunt Judith, in keeping with her part of the script, 'Partly from me. Some,' reaching deftly for Iain, or Isobel the better to chuck a finger under their chins or stroke their hair, 'some of that is your doing. Or your mother's.'
Well, and Iain got it from Auntie Mharie too, the Gaelic. Iain only half-remembered her arriving at Fox Corner. He'd been little at the time, or he liked to think he'd have made the effort to document it better. He doubly would if he'd known that one day someone was going to force him to classify her either as 'aunt' or 'cousin' or 'sister' and not the weird, nebulous conglomerate of all three that she in fact was.
But he hadn't known - how could he? So instead, Iain had only the sense memories. Jam was Aunt Judith, raspberry jam, baby talc, and something peculiarly hers that Iain couldn't name. Aunt Faith was all medicinal, lanolin, goose grease, ether and carbolic. Auntie Mharie was fish, sun and a laugh like birdsong, and she belonged to that strange, nebulous space that rendered her too old for a sister, too young for an aunt, and too close for a cousin. Though that wasn't right, because going by the letter of the thing Christopher, Helen and Sophy were cousins, and Iain often forgot where his family left off and theirs started, but that was all part of the same vexed thing. He spared a glare for the blackboard - Describe your family - and then immediately felt sorry, because it was obvious that for Mr Villiers to have assigned this question in the first place he couldn't possibly have a family half so tangled, and rich and complicated.
The point was, Auntie Mharie had arrived back in the days when Iain was too young for the theatre, when Nesha was just little. Aunt Mharie came in one day from Nowhere, as Iain pictured it, and stayed. He had an idea he'd minded at first, the way the sprawl of her books invaded the dining table, her way of disappearing into another world with Mam for hours while Iain sat at their feet and tried to find the opening to come after them.
Then Nesha had become Nattie and all right, she wasn't a true cousin, and she certainly wasn't a sister, but she felt closer than either, and somewhere between one and the other they had a world that even Christopher and the girls couldn't quite infiltrate, and that made it all better.
Other times, Iain remembered, it had been the three of them together, Nattie and Iain and Auntie of an afternoon, lying under the shade of the pines making cloud pictures. Or curled on her knees while she read aloud to them from whatever book the school had assigned her. It couldn't have been this school, Iain reasoned now, because Aunt Mharie used to glow with the work the way Mam glowed with the acting and it didn't make sense that she should have liked this school when it had once got Helen in trouble for shorthand and was even now trying to make him explain about his family, vast, elaborate quandary that that was. She had taught them to make Jacob's Ladders, Auntie Mharie; Iain recalled this plainly, the slippery ribbon and the grain of the wood under his still-stubby fingers. The click-clack of the ladder rungs when they slotted into place and tumbled glad riot against each other. And then, of course, they had seen Scotland together. Had fallen in love with it together. If Iain sat very still and quiet, eyes closed, he could just hear the roar of the sea, and Auntie Mharie more girl than Aunt crying out, playful, Race you!
All of that, and he hadn't even started on Aunt Faith, and it was well established that you went to her with your scrapes. Not just the ones that needed stitching, but the really, properly scrapes, like this essay that wouldn't write, because without exception she'd take you in hand, kiss your forehead and laugh in that special way that was so patently not at you but at the thing itself, and make it all better. Of course, it was an unwritten law that one went to Aunt Faith for all the actual scrapes too, because after the obligatory 'How on earth did you do that?' she always fixed it so it didn't hurt and nine times in ten conspired to keep the whole thing secret. She always had a story about something or other she had done as a girl. She kept those for the painful moments, like stitches, so that you'd pay more attention to the story of how she rode a pig (a pig!) through Glen St Mary and never notice that she was still stitching up a gash on your knee, or what have you.
He couldn't write any of it. Not the theatre, because Mr Villiers would condemn it, not the sunny afternoons with Aunt Judith, because he'd say they didn't count. Ditto those long, lazy days with Aunt Mharie that he only half-remembered anyway. He couldn't write down any of the stuff Aunt Faith had told him, or about the scrapes she had saved them all from over the years, because he'd heard her say before it had caused scandals for her Da growing up, which meant it probably would cause one for the school now. Iain didn't have a terribly high opinion of the school. He certainly couldn't write about the animals having souls (though they did, Iain knew) not least because that was the way to the inexplicably complicated hodgepodge theology of Nattie and Aunt Judith, which was, apparently, a kettle of fish unto itself that seemed to upset everyone except their own hodgepodge family. He hadn't even realised it was anomalous until an afternoon years ago, when Aunt Faith had dropped in on Mam to vent frustration about some scene or other inspired by Tibby Carlisle's apparently unforgivable use of Yiddish at school. Why this should be unforgivable was still unclear to Iain, who had at this juncture been sent from the room, presumably so Mam could join in the ranting. So Iain wasn't sure. But he did remember Aunt Faith, righteously indignant and glowing with it. He supposed, thinking about it now, that if he'd wanted, he probably could have crept back and listened at the railing. Sophy would have done it. Mind, Sophy's mother would have forgiven the transgression, whereas Iain didn't really think…
And there he was, back at the vexed quandary of the hour. People were still writing with animus, and the more Iain thought the thing over, the less he understood how they were doing it. Did they really just have the one family to write about? One person who'd mothered them? If so, Iain felt awfully sorry for them, even as he stared balefully at the blank page in front of him. It might simplify things, certainly, but how much duller life would be. He supposed they'd never talked murder around the dinner table, either, or sat in the wings of the Crown Imperial prompting the adults on long, grey winter afternoons. How strange it seemed – and how quiet it sounded. To never romp with Teddy Lovall across the rolling lawn of Uncle Geordie's home, or scurry after journalistic Kitty to follow a lead, or sit at the elbow of his adults and try to keep abreast of their conversations. It couldn't only be him. It wasn't, because Nattie, Rachel, Tibby and all the Carlisles did it, too. Christopher, Helen and Sophy. Even little Isobel was joining in, or starting to.
A shrill metallic rattling declared the bell sounded. Nothing for it but to put his name in the top right corner of his still blank page, fold the paper in thirds and submit it along with everyone else. Mr Villiers wouldn't like that, either, but it couldn't be helped. The man would ask impossible questions. Iain handed it off, not looking, wondering if this was how his parents felt whenever he went to them to unravel some piece of ecclesiastical doctrine; why couldn't Presbyterians eat God, and why couldn't you mix linen and wool? (It was something about priests. Aunt Judith had come to the rescue on that one.) Which only proved that at least his questions were answerable.
Even so, it dogged Iain through the rest of the day. Whatever else Iain could or couldn't do, he was supposed to be good at thinking things out. He'd failed in this instance completely. Consequently he dragged his feet on the walk home, scuffing his shoes in the dust, resigned to polishing them after supper. Helen fell back with him to check he was all right, and Iain only grimaced. He grimaced again at the turning to Fox Corner, and Nattie offered to come with him. So did everyone else, but Iain thought maybe he'd be better alone. At least if they weren't there in the event of a telling-of he could box it away into a rarely used corner of his brain.
But there was only Da, sitting on the steps, waiting for him. Iain's stomach dropped into his shoes.
'I had an interesting call from the school,' he said, gesturing at Iain to sit down. Iain did, and his stomach lurched out of his shoes and landed somewhere around the centre of the earth.
'Oh?' said Iain. 'It wasn't about anything I didn't write, was it?' He could not look at Da. His shoes had suddenly become magnetic in their fascination.
'Ah,' said Da, 'so you heard about that?'
'Well,' said Iain, 'I was there, wasn't I? I guessed they'd say to you.'
'Any particular reason you couldn't finish it?' asked Da. Iain's shoes were still hypnotic. Something about the laces, he decided.
'Family,' he said, to those same laces. 'They wanted me to write about family, didn't they? Mothers and that. 'Cept it's all complicated, and it didn't seem fair to say just about…' It was impossible to explain. Iain shrugged and gave up. Something had settled uncomfortably around Iain's shoulders. Sun-warm and vaguely heavy. Da's arm, he realised. Unaccountably, he was being pulled in to a hug.
'Ah,' said Da, settling Ian snug against his side. 'That's an awfully complicated question for the first week of school.'
'D'you think?' said Iain. He felt his stomach beginning to re-enter his body. He even risked a peek upwards at his father's face. He didn't look upset about it. Funnily enough, he looked, well, sympathetic.
'How much,' he asked, with a squeeze of Iain's shoulders, 'have I ever told you about Mother Susan?'