Messalina of the suburbs

by E. M. Delafield

Edgar had told her all about Aunt Tessie before they were married. He had explained that she would live with him always, in spite of the undeniable fact that she was Not like Other People, and that he would never allow her to be sent away to an institution, whatever the other Lambe relations might say.

Aunt Tessie had been very good to him when he was a little boy, and this Edgar never intended to forget. He had had a very unhappy childhood, with a mother who drank and a stepfather who beat him. Aunt Tessie, who had actually made a living for herself in those days out of painting pictures, had done everything that she could do to induce them to let little Edgar come and live with her, and when they would not agree to that, she had still sent him presents and surreptitiously given him pocket-money, and when he had been sent away to school, she had come regularly and taken him out, and invited him to her flat whenever she could. She was the only person who had ever shown him any affection when he was a child, Edgar had once told his wife.

Maude had been very much touched, and thought it noble of dear Edgar to remember so faithfully, in his great prosperity, the good old aunt who had long ceased to be able to paint even bad pictures, and who had become terribly, almost dangerously, eccentric about ten years earlier. Edgar had then immediately taken her to live with him, declaring Aunt Tessie once and for all to be his charge.

All this he had explained to his wife before they were married, and her generous and even eager acquiescence had met him more than half-way.

Maude, indeed, had been ready to accept Aunt Tessie as her charge, too. She had felt nothing but a tender compassion for the probably frail, half-childish invalid, towards whose garrulousness she would never fail of kindly semi-attention, and to whose bodily weakness every care should be extended. But Aunt Tessie had turned out not to be that sort of invalid at all.

To begin with, her physical health was robust and powerful. She was only fifty-five, and her hair was not grey, but a strong, virulent auburn.

Her complexion was sanguine, her large, harshly-lined face suffused with colour and disfigured by swelling, purplish veins.

Her voice was very loud and hoarse, and she laughed with a sound like a neigh. As for Aunt Tessie’s appetite, it was simply prodigious. Even had expense been a serious consideration at Melrose, Mrs. Lambe would never have grudged anyone a hearty meal—she had too often gone semi-hungry herself for that—but really, Aunt Tessie, with her second and third helping of beef, and her two glasses of claret, and her frank eagerness for dessert chocolates, was not decent.

She always had her meals in the dining-room, and it was really on that account that Ena and Evelyn had their midday dinner upstairs, and only came downstairs when the starched and mob-capped maids were handing round coffee. Their mother would have liked them to come to the dining-room for luncheon, at least on Sundays, but they both hated Aunt Tessie, and made faces and laughed at each other when she uttered any of her loud, inconsequent remarks, or pushed her food into her mouth with her fingers.

Maude, and even Edgar, had tried to persuade Aunt Tessie that it would be more comfortable for her to have all her meals in the large upstairs sitting-room that they had given her, but Aunt Tessie had been first angry and then hurt. They wanted her out of the way, she said angrily, they were ashamed of her, and did not like her to meet their friends.