The Grand Tour of Aunt Philippa

On the second Sunday of January, 1764, in the parish of Saltwood in Kent, over a dish of boiled mutton that nobody was enjoying, Aunt Philippa put down her fork and announced that she was going on the Grand Tour.

There was a silence at the table. It was the particular silence of a family that has heard Aunt Philippa announce things before.

Mara's father, who was her younger brother, cleared his throat. "The Grand Tour, Philippa."

"France," said Aunt Philippa. "The Alps. Venice, Florence, Rome. Naples, if the roads allow, and Vesuvius, if Vesuvius allows. I have the money, I have the time, I have a sound constitution and a good pair of boots, and I am sixty-one years old, Henry, which means that if I do not go now I shall go to my grave having seen nothing but Kent and Bath, and I have seen quite enough of Bath."

"The Grand Tour," said Mara's father again, carefully, "is for young gentlemen. To finish their education. To polish them."

"I have watched a great many young gentlemen come back from being polished," said Aunt Philippa, "and most of them came back exactly as dull as they went, only with worse debts and a taste for French wine. I intend to do it properly." She picked up her fork again, and pointed it down the table, past the mutton and the boiled carrots and the cruet, until it came to rest on Mara.

"And I shall take Mara."

Every face at the table turned.

Mara had been, until that moment, thinking about nothing more dangerous than whether there was any pudding. Mara was seventeen, and had spent seventeen years in Saltwood, and had never been farther than Canterbury, except once to Rochester, which had rained. Mara drew a little, not well, and read a great deal, not always the right things, and had been told by the curate that her handwriting was the only tidy thing about her whole person.

"As my secretary," said Aunt Philippa. "I shall need letters written, and accounts kept, and a journal, and I cannot see to thread a needle any longer, let alone read a French bill of fare by candlelight. Mara writes a clear hand and has a good memory and is not, so far as I have observed, a fool. That is more than can be said for most of the people I shall meet."

"Philippa," said Mara's mother faintly. "A year abroad?"

"Ten months," said Aunt Philippa. "Perhaps fourteen. We leave from Dover on the first of February." She looked at Mara, and for the first time her voice changed, very slightly, as if something under it had shifted. "If Mara will come. I shan't drag anybody across the Alps who does not want to be dragged."

Everyone looked at Mara again.

Aunt Philippa Wraxall had been a widow for nine years. She lived alone, except for her maid, in a tall, cold, untidy house on the hill above Hythe, full of books and fossils and stuffed birds and the smell of lamp oil, and she walked the shore below the cliffs every morning in all weathers with a hammer and a basket, looking for the shells of creatures that had been dead for longer than the Bible said the world had existed. She had once told the bishop so, at dinner. She had once told a duke that his hounds were badly bred and his opinions worse. She had once, when Mara was nine, sat up all night with Mara through a fever, reading aloud from a book about volcanoes, and had not told anybody.

Her husband, Uncle Edmund, whom Mara could only just remember as a large, gentle, wheezing presence with a smell of snuff, had made the Grand Tour himself as a young man, forty years before. He had brought back a marble head from Rome. It still stood in the hall of the house above Hythe, on a pillar, where it had always stood: a Roman lady with her hair dressed in tight curls, a broken nose, and an expression of mild, eternal disappointment. Uncle Edmund had loved it more than anything he owned. He had called it the Signora. He had talked to it, the family said, when he thought nobody was listening.

"Well?" said Aunt Philippa.

"Yes," said Mara.

It came out much louder than Mara had intended, and rang off the pewter, and made the dog under the table bark.

Mara's mother opened her mouth. Mara's father opened his. And Aunt Philippa, at the far end of the table, laughed out loud, a sudden, delighted, unladylike bark of a laugh that made the dog bark again.

"There," she said. "That is the voice of somebody who has been waiting seventeen years for a door to open. Henry, close your mouth. Margery, you may write to me every week and tell me how dreadful it all is. Mara, you will need a stout travelling coat, two pairs of boots, a writing case, and nothing else whatsoever that you think is necessary, because it is not."

Later, much later, when the mutton had been cleared and the argument had been had, and lost, by everybody except Aunt Philippa, Mara walked her out to her carriage in the cold, under a hard sky full of stars.

"Thank you," said Mara.

"Don't thank me," said Aunt Philippa. "You haven't been seasick yet." She paused with one foot on the carriage step and looked up at the stars. "Your uncle went when he was nineteen. He used to say it was the only year of his life he was ever entirely awake." She climbed in, and pulled the rug over her knees, and looked out at Mara through the window. "I should like to be entirely awake for a year, before I go to sleep for good. And I should like a witness. Goodnight, Mara."

The next three weeks were the busiest of Mara's life.

There were passports to be got from the French ambassador's office in London, and letters of credit from a banker in the Strand, who looked at Aunt Philippa over his spectacles as if she were a comet that had landed in his counting-house. There were letters of introduction to be begged from every acquaintance who had ever been abroad: to an English banker in Paris, to a consul in Venice, to a cardinal's secretary in Rome, to a great many people with long names who might or might not remember the person who had written them. There were trunks to be packed and unpacked and repacked. There was a courier to be hired: a small, brown, weather-beaten Londoner called Jem Quiller, who had made the Tour nine times with nine different young gentlemen and spoke, he said, "French like a Frenchman, Italian like an Italian, and German like a man who's been kicked by a horse." And there was Aunt Philippa's maid, Mrs Dorcas Pyke, to be persuaded to come at all. She had never been abroad, did not hold with it, and said so every hour on the hour until the morning they left.

And at the very bottom of Mara's trunk, under the stout travelling coat and the two pairs of boots and the writing case, wrapped in a shirt, where Aunt Philippa would not see it, was the one thing Aunt Philippa had expressly said to leave behind.

There were also, unexpectedly, presents. Mara's father, who had argued longest against the whole scheme, came up to Mara's room on the last evening but one, and stood in the doorway awkwardly for some time, and then held out a small, worn, leather-covered pocket compass that had been his own father's, and said gruffly that a person ought to know which way was home, and went downstairs again before anybody could thank him. Mara's mother sewed six gold guineas into the lining of Mara's stout travelling coat, "for emergencies, and not for French wine," and cried while she did it.

On the last night, Mara could not sleep. Mara sat in the window of the bedroom in Saltwood, with a candle, and wrote at the top of a clean page in the new journal, in her tidiest hand:

The Grand Tour of Aunt Philippa. Begun the first of February, 1764.

And then sat for a long time, looking at the page, unable to think of a single other thing to write, because nothing had happened yet, and everything was about to.