The Aunt's Story (18 page)

‘I have never really stopped to think,' said Theodora.

And now the sun on her eyelids disposed her to believe that this was the desired state.

‘That is dreadful!' said Mademoiselle Berthe.

‘It means you are a crypto-something,' sighed Mademoiselle Marthe. ‘However. Shall we go in to lunch? There is always food and conversation. The amiable little stylo that I received from the President of the Republic is proof that these can overcome even racial prejudice.'

Now the Demoiselles Bloch began to knit their way between the thorns. They scattered smiles. Because they were grateful, they were grateful for the privilege of living, amongst the iceplant and the crown-of-thorns. Following them, Theodora felt in her the opening of many old wounds. She could not altogether allow the behinds of elderly Jewesses a monopoly in suffering, though admitting that these have a propensity peculiar to themselves.

‘I hope, Marthe,' said Mademoiselle Berthe, ‘that there will be sardines to assist your theory. But the General may have finished them.'

‘I have gathered the General is fond of sardines,' said Theodora.

‘The General is fond of everything that he does not hate.'

Now, licking his large fingers, alone at his inadequate table, for this must be the General, Theodora knew, he belched rather loudly as the Demoiselles Bloch apologized to the
salle à manger
for their presence and their intention of eating food. Released from the Blochs, Theodora sat apart, under the orders of
le petit
who moved between the tables, silent, but with all the insinuation of the many stale tangoes he had sung.

‘
Un, deux, trrr-ois
,' called Henriette, the leather voice, through the hatch.

It appeared that she would cry soon. Her tongue had swelled.

‘
Il n'y a pas de pâté de fois gras de Strasbourg
?' asked the General.

‘
Non, je vous dis, il n'y en a pas. Il n'y en a jamais. Qu'est-ce que vous voulez? A prix fixel
'

‘
Merde!
' said the General.

‘I would like to remind you, General Sokolnikov, that there
are ladies present,' said the square woman with the girl.

‘
Merde, merde, et mille fois merde!
' said the General. ‘Shame on Miss Grigg. A lady is a woman's
pis aller
.'

‘I don't know about that,' said the square woman. ‘But there are some things that are not nice.'

‘Even my sister, a reasonable soul, and a spinster, whom I respected, God knows,' sighed the General, ‘even my sister Ludmilla was not a lady. She took snuff, and spat in the corners, and wore boots like a Cossack under her long skirts.'

Theodora smiled. Because the General was expecting it. And because her boots rang hollow on the cold yellow grass, and in her armpit she felt the firmness of her little rifle.

‘But not all reasonable,' the General said. ‘Religious too. She went on a pilgrimage to Kiev. She drank like a man. She said that it brought her face to face with God.'

‘Eat your lunch, Katina,' said the square woman to the girl.

Then they began again to sit in the silences of their separate tables, between which
le petit
spun his own resentful, wavy pattern. Many unfinished situations complicated the surface of the dining room, or lay folded, passive, and half recognized amongst the table napkins. They had not yet given Theodora a big white envelope for her napkin, so that for the present she could remain detached, count the fishbones and the sighs of other people.

The General sighed as deeply and as endlessly as cotton wool, but when he smacked his lips, or sucked from his fingers whatever it was, the suction of rubber sprang into the room, out of his face, for this was rubber in the manner of the faces of most Russians. His lips would fan out into a rubber trumpet down which poured the rounded stream of words, which he would pick up sometimes and examine through his little rimless spectacles. Theodora saw all this after the soup. She saw, in particular, the ring, formed by gold claws and a deep, guilty ruby, that held his tie, pushed through like a napkin.

After he had sighed a lot and counted his prawn shells several times, the General wrote Theodora a note:

Le petit
brought to Theodora the General's note, which was written distinctly on an envelope, as well as in the eyes of several ladies.
Le petit
dropped this message with considerable graceful scorn. She could see the canker of the rose mouth, the angry blaze of brilliantine. Though not for her alone. Across the distance she could see also the swelling ducts of Henriette, as she gathered prawn shells from other people's plates. The prawn shells rustled and creaked, rustled and creaked. In the hands of Henriette the dream became a purgatory. For choice she would have worn the body of a tango, sleek and supple, violet-scented. She would have sat in chairs of which the flesh returned the pressure of her thighs. But Henriette was the everlasting
vache
. Stung by the example of the General's gadfly note, she breathed, and shifted weight, but she still failed to dissolve
le petit
in the melancholy of her cow eyes.

‘
Ah, j'ai mal au coœur
,' lowed Henriette.

‘
Tête à claques!' le petit
murmured. ‘
Où sont les bouchées à la reine
?'

Through so much business, of dialogue and forks, the General's note still floated. Its madness shocked the room into an appearance of reality, in which tables and chairs assisted the rite of eating, and the bamboo
étagère
had never stood any nonsense. Tufted with sparse palms, the upright structure of the
étagère
made the reasonable Ludmilla more distinct. Though even she had disappointed, taking God too often from the cupboard, and tramping the roads to Kiev. Theodora felt disconsolate. Under her hand the General's madness was waiting for an answer. She remembered the days, before Ludmilla, when behaviour was more or less predictable. That is, she liked to think she could remember, but she suspected the only certainty is death.

So she took out her fountain pen, which was a travelling present from the boys, and holding it rather upright, wrote:

Mademoiselle Berthe coughed away the silence.

‘
Comme je suis désolée d'avoir perdu mon petit stylo
,' her sister said.

Miss Grigg watched Miss Goodman hand the boy a note, in a manner she would have described as ‘without a blush'. Miss Grigg watched Alyosha Sergei Sokolnikov receive a communication from the moon.

It was nothing short of this, the General felt. He trounced Theodora's modest message. To describe anything as simple when everything was desirably vast. Anyone questioning the vastness denied the existence of Sokolnikov. Sensing extinction the General frowned.

‘
Vous voulez la bouchée à la reine?' le petit
asked.

‘
Je désire tout, tout!
' The General frowned.

Theodora sipped her wine. Her veins had begun to flow in great sounding rivers. She heard the cardboard castle of the
bouchée à la reine
crumble and crash beneath the General's fork. It was obvious now that clocks were keeping another time. Swords and braided ancestors hung on the dark walls, and a large landscape of cupolas almost obscured by soot. From the saints' corner she could hear the descant of gold and silver. Holy faces stared with one brown expression above a fluctuating ruby.

‘Everything, everything,' said Aloysha Sergei, tracing on the face of the table, in the slops, past the welts of candlewax, his thought. ‘When I was a little boy, Ludmilla, I imagined I might some day put it in a box. Then when I was a young man, a youth in my teens, at the Military Academy, to be precise - I can remember my moustache - I discovered that this might not be feasible. Because everything is nothing, I said. For a long time it spoiled my appetite.'

Theodora heard her boots on the bare boards. She sat with her legs apart, like a man, on equal terms with the saints. Sometimes, very late, when the darkness was full of clocks, the world was a little crystal ball that she could hold in her hand, and stroke and stroke.

‘Everything is nothing, and nothing is everything.'

As if it were necessary to grumble, at that hour. She could hear his voice falling, and the skeins of smoke, and the intermediate silences, and snow. She held her little crystal comfort in her hand.

‘Whereas, if nothing were nothing,' his voice said.

‘Go to bed, Alyosha Sergei. It is late. And you begin to repeat yourself. You are drunk,' Theodora said.

‘Drunk? In a moment, Ludmilla, you will talk to me about religion.'

‘I shall not be so unwise,' she said.

But she knew, and smiled, because the world was a little crystal ball.

‘But you believe in God,' said Alyosha Sergei.

‘I believe in this table,' she said.

‘A vulgar yellow thing that we have because we have nothing else.'

‘But convincing,' she said. ‘It has such touching legs.'

And because she knew, she smiled.

‘Ludmilla,' he said, leaning forward, ‘what a beautiful, luminous thing is faith.'

He held his head to prevent it bouncing.

‘Do you also believe in the saints?' asked Alyosha Sergei.

‘I believe in a pail of milk,' said Theodora, ‘with the blue shadow round the rim.'

‘And the cow's breath still in it?'

‘And the cow's breath still in it.'

‘Ludmilla, I love you,' said Alyosha Sergei. ‘Even when you are a sour, yellow, reasonable woman, who rumbles after camomile tea. Even when you are yourself. But when you are your two selves among the saints, then Ludmilla, I love you best.'

And he bent forward and touched her moustache, and she noticed there was dirt beneath his fingernails, but it did not revolt her.

‘Vous ne voulez pas de bouchée à la reine?' le petit
asked, weaving willow between the tables.

No, said Theodora, she did not want. At the same time she avoided the General's face, from which he was sweeping pastry crumbs with his enormous rubber hand.

Miss Grigg said you never knew with pastry, it was always something in disguise. The girl looked out of the window, the side the sea was, where men were hauling nets, and the fish were silver as caught water lying in the men's hands.

‘
Où est Madame la Comtesse?
' asked the young man who came and stood in the doorway, his face shaped like a scooped bone, though seen flat on it was not unlike a 'cello.

‘
Madame la Comtesse
,' replied
le petit
,
‘est partie
,
on ne sait jamais où
,
avec un paquet de sandwiches et sa liberté
.'

‘Of course. She told me,' said the scooped bone.

But twice told, it did not mitigate the strain. He went away, leaving a patch of silence by the door.

‘
Comme je déteste ce petit maquereau
,' the General said.

‘They say 'e's a poet,' said the square woman.

‘I cannot help that. I am upset,' the General said. ‘Either it is the indigestion, or …'

Theodora Goodman read his face. She saw many midnights look into mirrors in doubt, stumble down the corridor, and turn the key.

‘It is the indigestion,' the General said.

But soon, she knew, he would unlock his solitude. Soon he would not bear the loneliness. He would look out.

Mademoiselle Marthe said that he should try hot water.

‘With a squeeze of lemon,' added Mademoiselle Berthe.

‘I shall try nothing,' said the General peevishly. ‘And if that woman is a countess I am a cook.'

‘Which woman?' asked Theodora.

‘You would not know,' said the General. ‘It takes a lifetime to unravel the history of such impostors. And you have arrived by the morning train.'

She began to feel this without the telling. But it was something she had suspected all her life. Now she knew. She walked with her hat in her hands, the big straw with the unfortunate sallow ribbons, she walked to where her mother sat, saying in her small, horn, interminable voice: Here is Theodora, we were discussing whether, but of course Theodora would not know, Theodora has just arrived.

‘It is often a virtue,' the General said quickly.

As if it were their own problem, and here they had solved it
in secret session. The General was glad for something. So that Theodora was also glad.

But now the doors had begun to be thrown open, from some distance, you could hear, many doors. You could hear the opening bars, the rather stiff overture muffled by the velvet through which it played, the heavily encrusted bows just scraping the wreaking gut. Even
le petit
put away his scorn. His body grew softer, listening. He had a child's amazed lips. So that you could hardly bear to wait for the last creaking of the last door.

‘
C'est Madame Rapallo
,' said Mademoiselle Marthe.

‘
Oui
,
c'est Madame Rapallo
,' said Mademoiselle Berthe.