Travels With My Aunt

She enjoyed talking, she enjoyed telling a story. She formed her sentences carefully like a slow writer who foresees ahead of him the next sentence and guides his pen towards it. Not for her the broken phrase, the lapse of continuity. There was some-thing classically precise, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say old-world, in her diction. The bizarre phrase, and occasionally, it must be agreed, a shocking one, gleamed all the more brightly from the old setting. As I grew to know her better, I began to regard her as bronze rather than brazen, a bronze which has been smoothed and polished by touch, like the horse's knee in the lounge of the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo, which she once described to me, caressed by generations of gamblers. `Your uncle was a bookmaker known as Jo,' Aunt Augusta said. '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. You had the misfortune to choose a nervous profession.' `I have certainly never banted for the sake of a woman,' I said jokingly. `You must tell me all about your women one day. In the Orient Express we shall have plenty of time for talk. But now I am speaking to you of your uncle Jo. His was a very curious case. He made a substantial fortune as a bookmaker, yet more and more his only real desire was to travel. Perhaps the horses continually running by, while he had to remain stationary on a little platform with a signboard Honest Jo Pulling, made him restless. He used to say that one race meeting merged into another and life went by as rapidly as a yearling out of Indian Queen. He wanted to slow life up and he quite rightly felt that by travelling he would make time move with less rapidity. You have noticed it yourself, I expect, on a holiday. If you stay in one place, the holiday passes like a flash, but if you go to three places, the holiday seems to last at least three times as long. `Is that why you have travelled so much, Aunt Augusta?' 'At first I travelled for my living,' Aunt Augusta replied. `That was in Italy. After Paris, after Brighton. I had left home before you were born. Your father and mother wished to be alone, and in my case I never got on very well with Angelica. The two A's we were always called. People used to say my name fitted me because I seemed proud as a young girl, but no one said my sister's name fitted her. A saint she may well have been, but a very severe saint. She was certainly not angelic.'
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 I asked her what her boy-friend's project was. 'He wants to do a series of enormous pictures of Heinz soups in fabulous colours, so a rich man could have a different soup in each room in his apartment — say fish soup in the bedroom, potato soup in the dining-room, leek soup in the drawing-room, like they used to have family portraits. There would be these fabulous colours, all fauve. And the cans would give a sort of unity — do you see what I mean? It would be kind of intimate —you wouldn't break the mood every time you changed rooms. Like you do now if you have de Stael in one room and a Rouault in 'another.' The memory of something I had seen in a Sunday supple-ment came back to me. I said, 'Surely somebody once did paint a Heinz soup tin?' `Not Heinz, Campbell's,' Tooley said. 'That was Andy War-hol. I said the same thing to Julian when he first told me of the project. "Of course," I said, "Heinz and Campbell are not a bit the same shape. Heinz is sort of squat and Campbell's are long like English pillar-boxes." I love your pillar-boxes. They are fabulous. But Julian said that wasn't the point. He said that there are certain subjects which belong to a certain period and culture. Like the Annunciation did. Botticelli wasn't put off because Piero della Francesca had done the same thing. He wasn't an imitator. And think of all the Nativities. Well, Julian says, we sort of belong to the soup age — only he didn't call it that. He said it was the Art of Techno-Structure. In a way, you see, the more people who paint soups the better. It creates a culture. One Nativity wouldn't have been any use at all. It wouldn't have been noticed.'
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Obviously I had hurt her deeply by refusing to listen to the story of the man called Charles Pottifer. I saw her off at the station and received the coldest of cold pecks upon the cheek. 'I didn't mean to offend you, Aunt Augusta,' I said. 'You resemble your father more than your mother. He be-lieved no story was of interest outside the pages of Walter Scott.' 'And my mother?' I asked quickly. Perhaps at last I was to be given a clue. 'She tried in vain to read Rob Roy. She loved your father very dearly and was anxious to please, but Rob Roy was going too far.'
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He was not singing and I doubt whether he was praying. `Mark my footsteps, good my page,' the sergeant sang lustily, `Tread thou in them boldly,' and the voices in the gallery rose ardently to the unexpected competition from below. At last the proper service began, and I was glad when the Athanasian Creed, which they invariably inflict on us at Christ-mas, was safely over. 'As also there are not three incomprehensibles, nor three' uncreated: but one uncreated, and one incomprehensible.' (Sergeant Sparrow coughed several times in the course of it.)
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 The river was low, and a rumour spread that we might not be able to get beyond Corrientes because the expected rains of winter had not come. A sailor on the bridge was continually heaving the lead. We were within half a metre, the priest told me, of the ship's draught, and he moved on to spread despondency further. I began for the first time seriously to read Rob Roy, but the moving scenery was a distraction. I would begin a page while the shore was half a mile away, and when I lifted my eyes after a few paragraphs, it had approached within a stone's throw — or was it an island? At the beginning of the next page I looked again, and the water was now nearly a mile wide. A Czech sat down beside me. He spoke English and I was content to close Rob Roy and listen to him. He was a man who having once known prison enjoyed freedom to the full. His mother had died under the Nazis, his father under the Communists, he had escaped to Austria and married an Austrian girl. His training had been scientific, and when he decided to settle in the Argentine he had borrowed the money to start a plastics factory. He said, 'I looked around first in Brazil and Uruguay and Venezuela. One thing I noticed. Everywhere but in the Argentine they used straw for cold drinks. Not in the Argen-tine. I thought I'd make my fortune. I made two million plastic straws and I couldn't sell a hundred. You want a straw? You can have two million for free. There they are stacked in my factory today. The Argentines are so conservative they won't drink through a straw. I was very nearly bankrupt, I can tell you,' he said happily. `So what do you do now?' He gave me a cheerful grin. He seemed one of the happiest men I had ever met. He had shed his past fears and failures and sorrows more completely than most of us can do. He said, 'I manufacture plastic material and let other fools risk their money on what they make with it.'