A Few Days in the Country (18 page)

When Theo ate his dinner and she and Stephanie talked to him, drinking tea, drinking coffee to keep him company, she drank with one of her life's teachers. He was a force of nature. She couldn't have imagined him if she hadn't known him. She would have known much less about good and evil without his lessons, but she had paid a great deal for them. Having learned, she could have moved on, but because her mother was held as surety his presence had remained, though unseen, pervasive in her life as a serious illness.

So they passed the sugar bowl and stirred.

Often, while she grew daily thinner with unfelt strain, Clelia had to laugh. Theo made her laugh, and Stephanie laugh, as he ate his dinner. He laughed so much that he had to gasp and wipe his eyes. They laughed themselves speechless and weak. None of them could remember afterwards what started them off. Sometimes Theo laughed so much that he was quite unable to convey what was in his mind. Catching laughter from him, the others would say, laughing, ‘What? What
is
it?'

‘Oh, I can't—' he would gasp, waving his arms at them, and rolling about in his chair.

Exhausted and dazed, they would emerge from these overpowering bursts of mirth and part at the door, Clelia and Stephanie taking away baskets, letters to post, notebooks full of lists for the following day.

With a new, childish good nature, Theo would stand at the door, waving and calling messages.

But Clelia had been a child more recently than Theo, and at first an excessively trusting one; she and her mother had fallen again and again into traps disingenuously prepared. Theo had many tricks and faces.

‘What is it, do you think?' Stephanie would ask, on the way home. Theo had never been famous as a laugher. This seemed very peculiar.

‘Do you think it's a symptom?' Clelia asked, wrinkling her forehead anxiously. ‘Is it some sort of mania?'

But since Clelia had been ten or eleven, most things Theo had said and done had undoubtedly been symptoms of nothing good, so that now it was difficult to judge. ‘When someone is so different from everyone else, you can't tell what's happening.'

Their powers of reasoning had somehow to be suspended in Theo's presence. They felt stupefied. He had often, in the past, been gratified to notice this effect he had on people.

In Clelia's kitchen the blossom began to fall. In her mother's house she had to open drawers, wardrobes. Everywhere, in the most remote cupboard, each object was fresh, carefully placed. Jovial, bluff, the doctor said to Clelia on the telephone, ‘We'll get him on a plane. Don't worry. If I have to push him in a wheelbarrow.' On an entirely different note, he added sadly before hanging up, ‘The wrong one died.'

Each day now, as the day of the flight sped towards them, Theo wanted to take less and less. From making off with every last teaspoon, he now could scarcely bother to take his own clothes.

‘At least take your radio. At least take your binoculars,' Clelia said.

‘Oh, I don't know. Don't you want them?'

‘Not really, Theo.'

He had no heart for anything. Clelia was the last sign.
She
was what he wanted, but she was no longer a possession to be packed.

Stephanie drove Clelia to the house on the last day. Theo was waiting, packed, with clothes, with money, with deeds to property, and yet like a refugee with nothing.

‘Quick! Quick! I want to show you something. Come in here.' Secretive, he led them through to the sitting room. ‘Now, wait there.'

Outside the mynas called noisily. Up at the junction on the main road to the city traffic was ceaseless.

‘What now?' Stephanie widened her eyes.

Clelia shook her head, and Theo returned with a big envelope and sat down on the sofa next to her. With shaking hands, he fumbled in the envelope, then carefully drew out a photograph, a studio portrait of a young man. ‘I was twenty when that was taken. Not bad, eh? Would you like it?' He seemed wistful. He watched her face.

Clelia hesitated. ‘Oh, Theo…You should take it with you. For your family.'

Restlessly he moved about. ‘
They
won't want it. I want
you
to have it.'

Here it was again—the mystery that pursued her through life in one form, in another, returning and returning, presenting itself relentlessly for her solution: how should human beings treat each other? How to treat Theo now? How to treat people who, when the opportunity was theirs, ill-treated you? How not to be overcome again and again by an aggressor if you were unwilling to meet blow with blow?

Neither her own considerable experience, nor the theories of others, the thinkers of centuries, solved it easily, once and for all, or even in a particular instance. Theo and his varied kind jumped instinctively on anyone down. They gained power from the ‘understanding' and ‘compassion' of others, counted on some such weak-mindedness, soft-heartedness, without understanding remotely the movements of thought and feeling from which they sprang. Benefit showered down, regardless of understanding, as if generous or magnanimous natures were part of the public utilities. Arguing in this way with herself, Clelia often concluded that such natures even
might
be part of the public utilities, magnanimity provided as tap water, electricity are provided. The alternative to
seeming
to cave in, to
seeming
overborne, was to deny oneself, become one with the aggressor, offer the final tribute. Theo destroyed the person closest to him, her mother. The worse overcame the better; the worse, the greater.

Theo sat with his own image in his hand, to some extent in her power. But what puny gesture of hers could do more than trivialise the past? A pettish or spiteful jab to Theo's ego would in its pointlessness insult the true tragedy a feeble gesture of rejection would be meant to avenge, even to point out to the forgetful Theo, with his memories of ‘no troubles'.

This mystery was so familiar to Clelia, had so often before demanded her attention, as though it were her most particular task in life to understand this fully, that her myriad reflections took place simultaneously in the time of receiving from Theo's hand his studio portrait, and then five or six others.

She held them.

He said, ‘I want you to have them. Would you like them?' And, reaching across, he shuffled through them.

Clelia said yes to every one.

Theo seemed very pleased, proud, and almost grateful. ‘There, then!'

He looked at her and, since she had already done more than she could do, Clelia met his eyes.

12

A Few Days in the Country

‘Heavens!' Sophie put her suitcase down on the concrete path and watched the cat flatten itself under a daphne bush and disappear.

‘I don't know why she does that,' Caroline said, looking after it abstractedly.

‘I don't usually terrify cats.'

‘No, it isn't you.' Caroline led the way up the broad steps to her house. ‘She always acts as if she thinks someone's going to murder her.'

Knocking Sophie's bag against the wall as she went ahead in a nervous rush, Caroline stopped at the entrance to a bedroom with two big windows and a view of eucalyptcovered hillside. She looked anxiously about. ‘Is this all right? Perhaps I should have given you the other room?'

‘Caroline,
no
. This is lovely. It was so kind of you to let me come.' And Sophie, who thought she never blushed, blushed from waist to forehead, and turned to give the oblongs of countryside her polite attention.

‘I
asked
you.'

Drawing a dubious breath, Sophie saw imposed on the wooded slope another landscape of such complexity that she could think of no one thing to say.

Caroline straightened the Indian rug, then eyed her guest, and went on laboriously, ‘How are you, anyway? Now that we're established.'

‘Oh, extremely healthy, as always.' Sophie heard the sudden liveliness in her own voice, felt herself brim, for Caroline's benefit, with something resembling animation and high spirits. Apart from the fact that none of this was true, she could see it must seem a little odd that someone as fine as all that should have taken up in so urgent a fashion—involving trunk calls and telegrams—an invitation given warmly, but on the spur of the moment, months before in Sydney. They had friends in common. Caroline was a widow, a doctor, and lived alone in this small country town. She was grey-haired, sturdy and, Sophie felt, mildly fantastic. Sophie herself was a pianist. This was almost all they knew about each other.

By way of explanation, Sophie now repeated, as she blindly snapped open the locks of her case, what she had said in yesterday's calls. ‘Suddenly the city just—got me down. A few free days turned up and I thought, if you don't mind…'

This was so far from being a characteristic impulse that she hardly knew how to account for herself. The universe was hostile. The sun rose in the west. She was in danger. Only strangers might not be malevolent. Something like all this was wrong.

‘Mind!' Caroline clapped her hands to her head, then fixed her springy hair behind her ears. ‘If you knew how we like to be visited! Now, come and have lunch. Then we'll produce some of this famous country air for you. Scoot around in the car. There were mushrooms out the other day.'

‘Really?'

They both smiled and relaxed slightly.

Sophie was not surprised to find that the mushrooms had been claimed by hungrier souls since Caroline first noticed them, but there was a wonderful cloud-streaked sky, a river, and waves of little hills to the horizon. Completing Caroline's circular tour, they returned to the house, took rugs on to the grass, and lay in the shade of a pear tree drinking iced coffee and losing control of the Sunday papers.

‘You won't see much of me. I'm missing all day and sometimes half the night, so you'll have the place to yourself. Mrs Barratt comes in to tidy up. Oh, and I forgot to show you the piano. Mr Crump tuned it yesterday as a special favour. Came out of retirement!'

‘Caroline.' Sophie looked at her in dismay. ‘All this trouble you've gone to. So kind. It makes me feel—'

‘What?'

‘Terrible. False colours, false pretences.'

‘I'll expect to hear of hours of practice when I get back every night,' Caroline continued firmly.

‘But I wasn't going to practise. I don't practise much any more. I'm—getting lazy,' she improvised.

Caroline glanced at her quickly, then thumped at a party of scavenging ants with a folded newspaper. ‘Of course you'll practise.'

Sophie shook her head. ‘Truly. It doesn't matter. Music's not the most important thing in the world.' She gazed down the grassy slope and up to the hills in the distance.

‘The most important thing in the world!' Scornful, roused, Caroline asked, ‘What is?'

‘Ah, well…' Sophie's voice had no expression. She did know.

But such a statement struck Caroline as merely silly. Quite apart from medicine, the world was full of causes, calls to effort. The list in her mind was endless. Even the imminent perfecting of man through education was not a thing she had doubts about.

The women eyed each other with goodwill and an awareness that they were natural strangers. The views of persons like that could not be taken seriously. It was almost a relief. They talked about politics and local controversies, and it scarcely mattered at all what anyone said.

‘You see!' Caroline stopped herself in mid-flight. ‘There's no one here to argue with except a few old cronies. So I rush back to Sydney every month, go round the galleries, and see some plays. Try to keep up…'

Sophie realised that she was at least partly in earnest, and felt a pang of appalled compassion as she habitually did now at what interested people, at the trouble they took to act in the world, move. If only they knew!

‘I'm going to leave you in peace now while I do some weeding. It's the Sunday ritual.' Caroline stood up, looking resolutely about the big garden.

How courageous! What fortitude! Pity moved in Sophie and she got to her knees, ready to stand. ‘Let me help. I can weed, or anything.' There was so much Caroline and everyone must never know.

‘Stay there. You're on holiday. You can do some watering later.' Preoccupied already, Caroline disappeared round the corner of the house, and Sophie sank back horizontal on the rug, and the light went out of her. Tears came to her eyes and she wiped them away and sat up again.

Her instruction resumed at full volume. Phrases that were by now only symbols indicating the devastation caused by grief transfixed her attention. The instruction had been going on for several months now. When she was in company or asleep, the volume was reduced, but the question and answer, the statements below the level of thought, never really stopped. A massive shock. A surprise of great magnitude. ‘A great surprise,' she repeated obediently.

In its way, the instruction was trying to save her, Sophie supposed. It wanted her to live. She humoured this innocent desire, attending to its words as though it were a kind, stupid teacher.

To be or not to be. Her lips half-smiled. Out in the world, when she lived out in the world, she had been stringently trained: nothing about herself, her life, her death, was worth taking seriously. Sophie smiled again. No wonder humankind could not bear much reality. The things that happened.

Caroline crossed the lawn, purposeful and silent, grasping secateurs. A long interval followed, during which only bees and shadows and leaves moved in the garden. The green tranquillity wavered and shifted in the currents of air. Sophie's heart jumped about in disorder as it often did now as the cat suddenly fled past her, out of a shady ambush. Patches of her forehead and head froze with fright. She took a deep breath and tried to stifle the bumping in her chest. Only the cat. Only Caroline's poor cat.

‘Puss? Puss?' Her tone compelled the cat to acknowledge her presence. ‘Don't be frightened. How nervous you are. Everything's all right.'