The Aunt's Story (19 page)

‘This Mrs Rapallo,' explained the square woman, ‘is always one for a late lunch. She's a queer one. You'll see.'

Theodora felt that she almost did not want to.

‘Who is Mrs Rapallo?' she asked.

‘She is an American adventuress,' said the General. ‘Of great ugliness, and great cunning.

‘
Non
,
non
,' protested Mademoiselle Marthe. ‘
C'est une femme douce
,
intelligente
,
spirituelle
.'

‘
Et qui souffre
,' said Mademoiselle Berthe. ‘She is most cruelly put upon.'

‘If you can believe,' said the square woman, ‘if you can believe, she is the mother of a princess.'

‘Principessa dell' Isola Grande,' said Mademoiselle Marthe.

‘Donna Gloria Leontini,' added Mademoiselle Berthe.

To Theodora it was not improbable, hearing the music advance, stiff and brocaded, formal as some flutes.

‘I detest Mrs Rapallo,' said Sokolnikov. ‘She is an impostor.'

But Theodora, enchanted by the gouty golden music, Theodora forgave.

‘Are we not all impostors?' she said. ‘To a lesser or greater degree? General, were you never afraid?'

The General blew out his rubber lips. ‘I detest all impostors,' he said.

Though without hindering Mrs Rapallo, whom time and history had failed to trip. She continued to advance. Her pomp was the pomp of cathedrals and of circuses. She was put together painfully, rashly, ritually, crimson over purple. Her eye glittered, but her breath was grey. Under her great hat, on
which a bird had settled years before, spreading its meteoric tail in a landscape of pansies, mignonette, butterflies, and shells, her face shrieked with the inspired clowns, peered through the branches of mascara at objects she could not see, and sniffed through thin nostrils at many original smells. Though her composition was intended to be static, sometimes Mrs Rapallo advanced, as now. Her stiff magenta picked contemptuously at the fluff on the
salle à manger
carpet. She felt with the ferrule of her parasol for the
billets-doux
that anonymous gentlemen had perhaps let fall. But most marvellous was the nautilus that she half carried in her left hand, half supported on her encrusted bosom. Moored, the shell floated, you might say, in its own opalescent right.

‘Well, I do declare. Everybody at an early luncheon.
Comme toujours
,' Mrs Rapallo said.

She said it and you felt she had spent a lifetime convincing the world she was not an Aztec. Now her breath rippled like a dove, her eye barely skimmed her fantastic shell.

‘It is lovely, it is lovely, may I look?' asked the girl, rejecting the square woman and the remains of her lunch.

‘Surely,' breathed Mrs Rapallo, holding her shell on her hand as if it were some strange bird that she had tamed. ‘It is quite elegant. It can't help but float. And that is an advantage. There is so much that is hateful. There is so much that is heavy.'

The girl took in her hands the frail shell. She listened to its sound. She listened to the thick-throated pines fill the room, their clear blue-green water, rising and falling. The music of the nautilus was in her face, Theodora saw, behind the thin membrane that just separates experience from intuition.

Then they began also to hear the General's breath. It swelled the room to bursting point. The walls of the
salle à manger
would either flap open or, from exhaustion, react like rubber, fly back into place.

‘Mrs Rapallo,' the General said, and now he advanced too, huge, domed, but never confined, increasing always with the resourcefulness of rubber, pink rubber at that. ‘Mrs Rapallo,' said Sokolnikov.

‘What is it you wish to express, Alyosha Sergei?' asked Mrs Rapallo.

Meeting somewhere about the centre of the room, you waited for their impact, the hard thick thwack of rubber and the stiff slash of the magenta sword. In moments of contention Mrs Rapallo stood at the head of the stairs. She repelled the uninvited guest with the coldness of inherited diamonds. These she reflected even in their absence.

‘Mrs Rapallo,' said the General, ‘you have bought the shell.'

‘I have not
borrowed
it,' Mrs Rapallo said.

‘Mrs Rapallo, may I inform you it is mine?'

Mrs Rapallo's eyelids denied that possibilities existed in the cage. She accepted only sunflower seeds and facts.

‘
Je suis allée en ville
,' she said, embarking on what they felt would be a long but necessary piece of recitative. ‘
Je suis allée en ville
. In a most oppressive bus. There are certain seasons of the year when the plush in the buses of France begin to breathe.
Enfin
. I bought me a spool of thread.
J'ai mangé une glace
. It was a lovely
pistache
green. And I bought, yes, Alyosha Sergei, I
bought
my nautilus. Of course I bought it. There it was. In full sail. I knew I had never seen perfection, never before, not even as a girl. And now it is mine. My beauty, I have waited all my life.'

But Alyosha Sergei Sokolnikov could not utter enough. Words did not fit the passage of his mouth. His hands could not reduce their size.

‘You are a thief,' he said. ‘It is immensely obvious. If there were any delicacy left in your American handbag, you would not have stolen what it is not possible to buy. Because it is not possible to buy, Mrs Ra-
pall
-o, what is already mine. It is mine from staring at, for many years. It responded through the glass. A tender, a subtle relationship has existed, which now in an instant you destroy. Oh, what an arrogant woman! What a terrible state of affairs! What assassination of the feelings! I do not hesitate to accuse. You are more than a cheeky thief. You are a murderess. You have killed a relationship,' the General cried.

‘Alyosha Sergei, you are nuts,' Mrs Rapallo said.

Appalled by such nakedness, the Blochs hung their heads. They scratched patterns with their forks and studied the habits of flies. But what they did not see it was no less horrible to hear.

The General had become quite fragmentary. ‘I am breaking,' he screamed.

And the room released him.

‘Sometimes the Russians are very Russian,' Mrs Rapallo remarked.

She had a hard American core from which she seldom found relief.

‘But I see,' she said, crushing walnuts through her gloves, ‘I see that somebody has come.'

‘Yes,' said Theodora.

Cast up out of other people's emotions, she felt her features had diminished, she was round, and smooth, and not particularly distinguished.

‘Well now, won't that be nice,' Mrs Rapallo said. ‘I hope we shall be great friends. I am Elsie Rapallo, formerly of New York City and Newport, Rhode Island, now of this hotel. My father was Cornelius van Tuyl.'

‘I am Theodora Goodman,' said Theodora, in case it was expected, though she did not think that she read it in Mrs Rapallo's eye.

‘Goodman? There was a young man,' said Mrs Rapallo, ‘Lucius, or Grant, I forget which. From Boston. He was an Abbott on his mother's side. A very eligible young man. He had a cleft chin, and sometimes wore a derby hat. In addition to money and relations, he had ideals. I was advised that I could not do better, but somehow, Miss Goodman, it sounded like a tombstone. So this Lucius, or Grant, or maybe Randolph Goodman married a woman who canned meat, and then proceeded to die slowly of Chicago.'

Theodora listened because it was her duty. She had come there for that purpose. Soon she would be told what else would be expected, whether, in her status, she would appear at dinner, or eat in her bedroom off a tray. She doubted whether she would be embarrassed, because Elsie van Tuyl had learnt that it pays to buy even the servants with charm. Standing on the steps, between white columns, she made her welcome both affectionate and quaint.

‘It is so dear of you to come to us, Theodora Goodman,' said the white gloves. ‘Welcome to our portals. We shall love having
you, and in return, we hope that you will love
us
. You and I shall be friends as well as companions. Because my life is almost a perpetual house party, I am particularly in need of friendship. For that reason our rooms have a communicating door, through which we can share secrets, and discuss the proposals that are made to me by rich young men. Soon we shall go up to see if the servants have put soap, towels, writing materials, and books.'

Now she shaded her boater and her smiles. She looked out of the porch towards the water. This, too, overflowed with summer, the blue and white, and the muslin yachts.

‘We have a number of interesting personalities I shall be glad for you to meet, Theodora Goodman,' said Elsie van Tuyl. ‘But just at present, poor dears, they are out amusing themselves.'

She smiled to cover a pause. She touched her pearls.

‘Oh, and this, by the way, is Mr Rapallo,' she said.

Theodora did not turn because she knew that Mr Rapallo would not possess a face. She accepted his dark hand. No one remembered Mr Rapallo's face. He was Niçois perhaps, or even a Corsican. Mr Rapallo, you felt, would disappear.

Everything else in the house was sure, substantial, silver. The buttons strained and kept the upholstery down. Elsie van Tuyl looked a million dollars, in white satin, by Sargent, over the dining-room mantelpiece.

At night when the older women, who had played their cards, sat amongst the whatnots in their diamonds talking of Europe, and the older men, quite grey and gnarled from minting money, minted it still, in their conversation of steel and steam and supernumerary souls, music melted the gardenia trees for the glorious young, who were still hesitating to sell themselves. About this time of night, Theodora Goodman saw, Elsie van Tuyl could never remember which waltz she should save for whom.

‘You must help me, Miss Goodman,' said the beautiful young man, creased and laundered, educated just enough, so as not to spoil the effect, of his clothes, of his perfectly shaven, rightly smelling, American cleft chin. ‘You must help me,' he said. ‘Shall we shake on it? One Goodman with another.'

‘I am only a companion, Mr Goodman,' Theodora said.

‘Sure,' said Lucius, or Grant, or Randolph. ‘Isn't that the
point? Don't you and Elsie write diaries together? And stick on the labels? And pull them off? Don't get me wrong,' said Lucius, or Randolph, or Grant. ‘Elsie's the finest gal. She has ideals.'

But Theodora, in spite of adjoining bedrooms and the communicating door, even though she took the ivory brushes to smooth out of Elsie van Tuyl the tiresomeness of the conversations, holding the long, black, intimate, distant, vastly expensive hair in her own hands, always failed to discover just how far companionship went.

‘I am tired,' sighed Elsie van Tuyl. ‘I have slaved at this season. Let us take our things and go to the shack. Just the two of us. Alone. We shall walk in the lanes, and gather blueberries, and feel the rain on us, and watch the emerald beetles. And, dear Theodora, I need your help and advice.'

Not that Elsie van Tuyl ever took what she asked for.

But they walked in the lanes, the little, sour, sandy lanes, where the emerald beetle staggered, and roots tripped, and the mouth contracted under sour fruit. They walked in the rain, linked, under the sodden trees, past the square white houses. In the morning they washed their faces in a bowl from which the enamel had cracked. In the evening they heard the fire spit, and the dark, sodden branches plastering the eaves.

‘I need your advice, Theodora Goodman,' said Elsie van Tuyl. ‘I am going to Europe with, well, you know whom. It is wrong. It is crazy. You will tell me to do instead many right and necessary things, because you are stiff as a conscience. Now give me your advice, which I shall not take. I am rich. I can buy my way out. For a very long time. I can even buy off my conscience. Now give me your advice. But, dear Theodora, I have already gone.'

Mrs Elsie Rapallo,
née
van Tuyl, or what remained, and what had been added, contemplated her nautilus, as if this quite luminously justified the hard and bitter facts. The nautilus sailed on the bamboo
étagère
, now past, now present, materialized.

‘Incidentally,' said Mrs Rapallo, cracking another walnut in her perpetual gloves, ‘incidentally, I have news.'

The wrinkles in her face opened and closed fearfully. You felt that her wounds had failed to heal. But she eyed the
salle à manger
without pain, waiting for someone to contradict.

‘News? News?' said Mademoiselle Berthe.

‘Of course. Can't you guess? It's 'er Gloria,' said Miss Grigg.

‘Yes,' said Mrs Rapallo. ‘Her letter was waiting at the
poste restante
. Gloria will pay us a visit.'

‘When? When?' asked Mademoiselle Marthe.

‘That is not yet fixed,' said Mrs Rapallo. ‘It depends on her social obligations. They may refuse to part with her in Rome.'

‘But of course she will come,' said Mademoiselle Berthe. ‘And does she suggest she will stay long?'

Mrs Rapallo fingered salt, reading in it some Arabian mystery that very likely she would not tell.

‘She will stay at Monte,' she said at last. ‘She will drive over for lunch one day. Gloria, of course, has many friends.'

Le petit
had brought a dish of very old
marrons glacés
, that were partly sugar, partly dust.

‘Gloria,' said Mrs Rapallo to Theodora Goodman, ‘is my daughter. The Principessa. She made a brilliant marriage. My lovely Gloria,' she said.

And she stroked the nautilus, as if she were touching a distance, a more transparent morning, in which she herself stood against the white columns and the yachts.

‘
Enfin
,' she said, her basketwork creaking as she got up.