The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [53]
Avery imitated the boys rolling their eyes.
– ‘Only a girl would think of something so ridiculous,’ said Owen. ‘And what a waste of a wish.’
‘What good would that be?’ I asked Nina, not unkindly. ‘The wool would get used up fast and then you'd have nothing.’
‘What do you mean?’ said Nina indignantly. ‘You've got a good warm sweater or blanket and you've still got the knitting needles. And they could be used for lots of things –’
‘Like a spear for piercing a wild boar,’ Tom suggested. He was next youngest and always defended his sister.
‘Or to dig holes for planting seeds,’ said Nina.
‘And for cleaning under your nails afterwards,’ added Tom.
‘But your nails wouldn't need cleaning if you used the knitting needles to make the holes,’ I said.
My mother and Aunt Bett approved of these discussions. ‘Now, that's sound judgment,’ they would say encouragingly. Or ‘Perhaps we might think that through again.’
‘Or you could use them to pierce a souffle,’ said Owen sarcastically.
‘A souffle!’ shouted Nina. ‘Yes, there might be ostrich eggs on the island!’
‘Haw haw haw!’ all the boys laughed.
‘All right,’ said Aunt Bett. ‘That's enough. Knitting needles are a very good idea, Nina … and there just might be ostrich eggs on the island.’
‘Haw haw haw!’ laughed Nina.
– Your family sounds like something out of a children's story, said Jean.
– That's just it, said Avery. I think my mother and Aunt Bett discussed it and decided we would all be children out of books. They were determined. We children were their war effort. Why not? You have all those other owner's manuals – Dr. Spock and all, so why not Arthur Ransome or T H. White? It's bound to work. To raise brave, moral, thinking adults, all you need is to give them a common mission –
– And a slab of chocolate and a torch. Ah, said Jean, that explains everything.
– I thought everyone grew up in a family like ours, said Avery. It was a shock to find out it wasn't so.
– Did your Aunt Bett have a sad childhood? asked Jean.
– All childhoods are sad compared to mine, said Avery.
Then Avery told the story of Nina's eighth birthday.
– When Nina's birthday package arrived from her father, who was in the RAF and stationed in an undisclosed location, she held the jewellery box in her lap, watching the ballerina come alive each time she raised the lid. Then Nina sat still with her terrible longing. I used to imagine Nina was my own little sister. I tried to look at the box the way my father would have; he would have talked to her about who'd carved it, the hands of the one who'd glued the pink gauze of the tutu onto the long legs of the wooden girl, who'd wrapped the felt around the black lacquer. Who was the man or woman who had tapped the tiny brass nails into the wood … I took her hand and led her into the sitting room, where the radio was on. The evening concert was beginning. The London Symphony Orchestra. Nina, who was deaf in one ear, used to sit next to me, her useless ear buried in one hand and her good ear open to the sound. She hooked her hair over this ear, so not a strand would get in the way of the music.
‘Here we are in the countryside,’ I told her, ‘listening to an orchestra from London and a violinist from Russia who are now actually in a concert hall in Holland. That's electricity. All of those musicians hundreds of miles away, playing to us from a little wooden box in our little house in the country.’
Nina sighed. ‘Tell me again about Maria Abado.’
‘Every nightbird can see the ghost of Maria Abado. If she is here, the birds will tell us. All over the world the birds remember her and speak her name. The cuckoos and the turacos, the colies, hoopoes, the shy trogons, cranes and grebes, tinamous, nightjars, frigate birds, and cassowaries. The avocets, hawfinches, snow