A Charm of Powerful Trouble Read Online Free Page A

Aunt Em had taken trouble with it. But it was strange, and empty.
    Emma had brought her drawing things with her, and Patrick White's Voss, which she had imagined reading on long lonely nights in the old house in the country. She'd thrown in a copy of Das Kdpital for good measure. Emma was an ambitious reader. She unpacked them, along with her small black transistor radio with its earplug. She hoped the radio would have reception. She thought of Aunt Em's place as the end of the earth.
    Her meagre things made no dent in the strangeness. Her clothes were swallowed by capacious drawers that had been lined with fresh newspaper, and her copies of Voss and Das Kapital merely looked as if someone had abandoned them on the night table. Emma went to the verandah door and laid her cheek against the timber doorjamb, listening for the tick of a heartbeat. She felt that such an old house must have a pulse. She rummaged in her bag and found an apple left over from the trip, and she lay on the bed and devoured it, a last link with home.
    Out in the hallway, she followed the sunlight till she was outside, and was startled by two pigeons taking off from on top of the water tank next to the door. The sound of their wings was like the squeak of someone running across dry sand. Yin-yin, yin-yin, sang the cicadas; their song throbbed inside her head. Emma sighed with satisfaction. Beth had said nothing about all this. The place was hers now.
    Em was in the lutchen makrng tea. It was a gloriously dim, damp-feeling room at the back of the house. Emma peered from the narrow window There were clumps of lilies growing outside in dark, damp soil. It was so shaded beside the house that no grass grew there. A thrill of attraction and fear had begun in Emma's heart for this place. It was both strange and familiar; it had been waiting for her all along.
    Emma pictured herself within this kitchen, within this house, within this damp, luxuriant landscape, and recounted to herself the journey which had taken her further and further from her old life. This was a house of shadows, of dark and light: dark inside, with squares of light where the doors and windows were. The floor of the kitchen and hallway were dark and light too, a chequerboard of tiles. It was a place that she felt she had dreamed about and forgotten.
    At a table with a lino top she sat and drank Em's strong, sour tea. Em said, ‘Well, my dear. How is your mother? And Beth?’ She blinked as she said it, surprising herself again.
    â€˜They're well,’ said Emma, stirring more sugar into her tea. ‘They send their love.’ This was true, but sounded as if she'd just made it up, from politeness. Her mother had sent presents, too: a flannelette nightie and a set of face washers, but Emma was shy of presenting them to Aunt Em and had left them in her bag.
    â€˜I'm so pleased you could come,’ said Em. She smiled and squinted; she seemed to have trouble with her eyes, for they watered at the slightest thing. ‘It's lovely to see Sam's children again. You were such a tiny thing when he brought you here.’
    Emma had long had a memory of arriving in a big house in the dead of night. It must have been her father's arms then, that had cradled her in the walk down a long hallway, and up the stairs to bed.
    Em peeled a freckled pear and cut it into slices, offering a piece to Emma. It was cold and delicious; the juice ran down Emma's arm and she wiped it away. Em ate the pear elegantly, slicing pieces from it until all that was left was a moist, square core. ‘I hope you'll find enough to do,’ said Em. ‘There's Flora, of course, who lives practically next door. She'll be company for you.’ Her voice was high and strange, an old lady's voice.
    â€˜I'm sure I'll find enough to do,’ Emma told her, smiling down at the table. She heard her own voice, smug and fat with youth. ‘I've brought some books, and my drawing things. Anyway, I enjoy a bit of