Aunt’s desire not to interfere influenced the shape of the house, which had a substantial sun parlour attached to the north side that was rarely warmed by any sun. Above the sun parlour was a suite of rooms that was Aunt’s alone. She could go in there and shut the door, she said, and be totally out of the way in her little sitting-room—it was quite big, really—and her bedroom with the little prayer-alcove off it, and her bathroom where she could do things she had to do—by which she implied difficult attentions to her destroyed scalp. Hamish and Marie-Louise need never know she was in the house when they were entertaining, or wanted to be by themselves, as married folk very properly should do.
Busy as a bee, nodding and smiling sweetly, deferring to everybody, Aunt built the house and even chose its name; 26 Scott Street simply would not do, and Aunt proposed St. Kilda, as a lovely name, and a link with Barra. As neither Marie-Louise nor Hamish had any alternative, that was what appeared in the stained-glass fanlight over the front door.
Aunt’s mind, busy as it was, never strayed toward introspection or the making of significant connections. If it had done so she might have wondered why one of her evening prayers was so particularly dear to her—that which ran:
God, who ordainest the services of angels and men in a wonderful order, be pleased to grant our life on earth may be guarded by those who stand always ready to serve thee in heaven… God, who in thy transcendent providence delightest to send thy holy angels to watch over us, grant our humble petition that we may be safe under their protection, and may rejoice in their companionship through all eternity.
Did Aunt think of herself as one of those divinely appointed guardians and servers? God forbid that she should be guilty of such pride! But beneath what the mind chooses to admit to itself lie convictions that shape our lives.
There had never been any suggestion that Aunt might go with the family on the great expedition to launch Mary-Jacobine upon the world. Aunt did not repine. She knew she was unsightly. Yes, yes, she insisted upon it, and when Marie-Louise or Mary-Jacobine or the Senator protested that it was not so, she would smile sweetly and say, Now dear, you don’t have to be kind. I know what I look like, and I have offered it up.
This business of “offering up” figured largely in Aunt’s religious life. After that terrible affair at Rideau Hall, she had offered up her attachment to Vergile Tisserant, as a sacrifice she hoped would be acceptable at the Heavenly Throne. Before Vergile there had been Joseph Crone, who had decided that he would rather be a Jesuit than Aunt’s husband, and she had offered him up, too. She offered up her ugliness, as an act of acceptance and humility. Oh, Aunt had plenty of gifts for God, and perhaps God was grateful, for He had given her quite a lot of power in her small sphere.
Letters from Marie-Louise and less often from Mary-Jacobine kept her aware of how things were going in England. Neither of the ladies had much gift for writing but—the mother in French, the daughter in English—they tried for as long as they could to keep Aunt informed. But a new kind of life, and new people, so far removed from anything Aunt had known, were not in their power to describe, and the letters grew fewer and briefer.
Aunt accepted this without complaint. She had much to do, maintaining St. Kilda in good order, and keeping the servants up to the mark. These were a Polish housemaid, Anna Lemenchick, who was so short as to be almost a dwarf, but broad beyond the ordinary, and a cook, Victoria Cameron, who was always on the verge of being dismissed because she had a fiery Highland temper and was apt, in the phrase Aunt used, to “kick right over the traces” if she were crossed. Everything was against Victoria; to begin, she was a Protestant, and there were plenty of Catholic cooks to be had; as well as a temper she had a rough tongue in her head, and gave saucy answers; she was also astonishingly bow-legged, and could be heard all over the house, tramping around the kitchen like a great horse. With these disadvantages it was not surprising that nobody noticed that she had a beautiful dark face, like one of the Spanish Madonnas Aunt admired so whole-heartedly. But who ever heard of a beautiful cook? Victoria’s trump card was that she was by many lengths the best cook in Blairlogie, a natural genius, and the Senator would not hear of letting her go. These, with visits twice a week from Mrs. August, a Pole who did the rough cleaning, made up the indoor staff.
The outdoor staff was all embodied in a drunken detrimental called Old Billy, who cared for and drove the horses, shovelled snow, cut grass, exterminated the flowers, and was supposed to do heavy lifting and any odd jobs that turned up. But Old Billy was a devout Catholic and a noisy repenter of his misdeeds and frequent toots, so it was impossible to get rid of him, grave trial that he was.
It was Aunt who looked after young Mary-Tess when she was home on holiday from the convent. That was easy, for Mary-Tess was a cheerful girl, and skating and tobogganing were her great pleasures. Aunt had little pleasures of her own. There was her music; she played and sang. And there was a weekly visit from the Senator’s mother-in-law, old Madame Thibodeau, a stately lady far gone in fat, who spoke no English but enjoyed a gossip in French, in which Aunt was as fluent as her brother. Old Billy was sent with the barouche, or in winter with the elegant scarlet cutter, to haul her up the hill every Thursday at four, and haul her back again, substantially heavier because of the great tea she had eaten, at half past five. Each month there was a visit from Father Devlin and Father Beaudry, of St. Bonaventura’s; as a guarantee of total chastity, they visited the old maid together, and devoured huge meals in gloomy silence, occasionally punctuated by the more edifying bits of parish news. Irregular and unforeseeable were visits from Dr. J.A.—Dr. Joseph Ambrosius Jerome, the leading Catholic physician of Blairlogie, who kept an eye on Aunt because she was supposed to be frail.
He was by far her liveliest visitor. A little, spare, very dark, grinning man, saturnine in his appearance and alarming in his opinions, he was locally believed to have powers of healing verging on the miraculous. He “brought back” lumbermen who had chopped themselves in the foot with one of their terrible axes and were in danger of blood-poisoning. He sewed up Poles who had decided some obscure point of honour with knives. He saw people through double pneumonia with poultices and inhalations and sheer exercise of his healing power. He told women to have no more babies, and threatened their husbands with dreadful reprisals if this were not so. He blasted out the constipated and salved their angry haemorrhoids with ointments of opium. He could diagnose worms at a glance, and drag a tapeworm from its lair with horrible potions.
If not actually an atheist, the Doctor was known to have dark beliefs nobody wanted to explore. He was rumoured to know more theology than Father Devlin and Father Beaudry clapped together. He read books that were on the Index, some of them in German. But he was trusted, and nobody trusted him more than Aunt.
He understood her case, you see. He knew her nerves as nobody else knew them. He hinted darkly that to be a maiden lady at her age was not altogether a safe thing, and to her terrible embarrassment he sometimes demanded to squeeze her pallid little breasts, and peep up her most secret passage, assisted by a flashlight and a cold tube called a speculum. A man who has done that has a very special place in a virgin’s life. And he teased her. Teased her and taunted her and refused to take her at all seriously; if she had known anything intimate about herself, she would have realized that she loved him. As it was, she knew him as a close, terrifying friend, upon whom she placed the uttermost reliance. He was almost more than a priest—a priest with a strong whiff of the Devil about him.