The Aunt's Story (2 page)

‘I shall probably go away.'

‘Good heavens,' said Fanny, ‘where?'

Freedom was still a blunt weapon. Theodora did not answer, because she did not know.

‘Anywhere. Or everywhere,' she said at last. ‘Except that the world is large.'

Theodora, blushed Fanny, is quite, quite mad.

‘It is very awkward for me,' she complained, ‘when people ask me your plans.'

‘But that is nobody's business,' Theodora said.

She wiped her mouth with her handkerchief. Strength had at last made her weak. And now, for a moment also, she touched
with the ball of the handkerchief the humiliating fringe of her moustache. Perhaps, after all, she would remain the victim of family approval and her upper lip.

‘Theo is quite right,' she heard the thick voice of Frank.

She was surprised, and grateful, but controlled, as if treading on a doubtful plank.

‘She may even find a husband,' the voice continued. ‘At her age. With her money. In Europe,' it said.

He looked at her for the first time since coming into the house, so that she felt the weight of it. His resentment was colossal. She saw the lips above the brown teeth, and she heard the laughter that did not come, but which should have burst thick and obscene, like the laughter of men that breaks through the frosted partition in a public house.

‘Don't be a fool, Frank,' said Fanny, disposing of her husband. And then in the appropriate key of sorrow, ‘What time is the funeral?' she asked.

‘At ten o'clock in the morning,' said Theodora.

Now Frank yawned, and stretched, to show by physical pantomime that he had not lost face. He would look up Bags Browne at the club. And dear, dear, remembered Fanny, there were the overcoats for the boys, before the shops shut.

‘I don't want an overcoat,' said George.

‘You'll get a whipping, my man,' his father said.

Afterwards, young Frank hoped, they would buy ice creams, and he would choose a sundae with marshmallow and chopped nuts, which last time made him sick, but it was good.

‘I shall stay with Aunt Theo,' Lou said.

It was too unimportant for even Fanny to object, or maybe it was that Fanny, aiming her displeasure at vaster targets, was exhausted. Anyway, she ignored an opportunity. She looked at Lou and agreed, deciding at the same time that she was yellow, scraggy, and unattractive. She had been christened Marie Louise, but circumstances and the child herself had conspired.

Then they had all gone, and the light became merciful.

‘There was an old woman in the train,' said Lou, ‘had her things tied up in a leopard skin. She had a photo of her married daughter, and three cold mutton chops. Her daughter's name is Mavis Forbes.'

‘It is possible,' said her Aunt Theodora Goodman.

So that a great deal remained remote, and upstairs a hideously shiny wooden box endeavoured to contain a mystery.

‘Did Grannie Goodman want to die?' asked Lou.

And again Theodora could feel the thin bone of an arm pressed against her waist.

‘I expect she felt it was time,' she said. ‘There was nothing left to do.'

‘I don't want to die,' said Lou.

‘There is no reason why you shall.'

But Theodora, talking of reason, drew in her mouth for her own oracular glibness, suddenly taking it upon herself to dispose of life and death, as if they were presents wrapped in tissue paper. She looked at the child's face. How far it was deceived she could not discover. It was a still, dark pool that for the moment did not reflect.

‘Tell me about something,' said Lou, the words warm in Theodora's shoulder. ‘Tell me about Meroë.'

‘Meroë?' said Theodora. ‘But my darling, you have heard it, and there is very little to tell.'

She had told the story of Meroë, an old house, in which nothing remarkable had taken place, but where music had been played, and roses had fallen from their stems, and the human body had disguised its actual mission of love and hate. But to tell the story of Meroë was to listen also to her own blood, and, rather than hear it quicken and fail again, Theodora smoothed with her toe the light on the carpet, and said, ‘But, my darling, there is very little to tell.'

I
T
was flat as a biscuit or a child's construction of blocks, and it had a kind of flat biscuit colour that stared surprised out of the landscape down at the road. It was an honest house, because it had been put up at a time when the object of building was to make a house, a roof with walls, and the predominant quality in those who made it was honesty of purpose. This is something that gets overlaid by civilization, in houses by gable and portico, in man by the social hypocrisies, but sometimes it survives in the faces in old photographs, beside the palm, and it was present too in Meroë, which was what someone had called the house before the Goodmans came.

Someone had called it this, and no one in the district remembered why. It had been accepted along with the other exotic names, Gloucester, Saumarez, Boscobel, Havilah, Richmond, and Martindale, that have eaten into the gnarled and aboriginal landscape and become a part of it. It was the same with Meroë. No one ever debated why their flat daily prose burst into sudden dark verse with Meroë in their mouths.
Meroë
, they said, in their flat and dusty local accents. Although the word smouldered, they were speaking of something as unequivocal as the hills. Only the hills round Meroë had conspired with the name, to darken, or to split deeper open their black rock, or to frown with a fiercer, Ethiopian intensity. The hills were Meroë, and Meroë was the black volcanic hills.

Up towards the house the flat swept, the tussocks grey in winter, in summer yellow, that the black snakes threaded, twining and slippery, and the little unreliable creek, whose brown water became in summer white mud. The house looked over the flat from a slight rise, from against a background of skeleton trees. But there was no melancholy about the dead trees of Meroë. They were too far removed, they were the abstractions of trees, with their roots in Ethiopia. On the north side of the house there were also live trees. There was a solid majority of
soughing pines, which poured into the rooms the remnants of a dark green light, and sometimes in winter white splinters, and always a stirring and murmuring and brooding and vague discontent.

This was the north side of the house, but on the south side there were roses, an artificial rose garden so untidy that it looked indigenous, and which was made because Mrs Goodman wanted one. She said from her sofa, let there be roses, and there were, in clay carted specially from a very great distance. For a moment it gave Mrs Goodman a feeling of power to put the roses there. But the roses remained as a power and an influence in themselves long after Mrs Goodman's feeling had gone.

Theodora, lying in her bed, could sense the roses. There was a reflection on the wall that was a rose-red sun coming out of the earth, flushing her face and her arms as she stretched. She stretched with her feet to touch the depths of the bed, which she did not yet fill. She felt very close to the roses the other side of the wall.

‘Theo,' they called, ‘it is time. It is time you washed your neck. It is time you went to the piano and practised scales.'

‘Yes,' she answered, ‘I'm coming.'

But she lay in the warm bed, remembering sleep, and drifted in the roselight that the garden shed.

These years had the roselight of morning, but there were also the afternoons, in which the serious full white roses hung heavy, and the lemon-coloured roses made their cool pools in a shade of moss. There were the evenings when red roses congealed in great scented clots, deepening in the undergrowth.

‘Where are you going, Theo?' they asked.

‘Nowhere,' she said.

She ran, slowed, walking now alone, where she could hear a golden murmur of roses. Above her she could see the red thorns, and sometimes she reached, to touch. She felt on her cheek the smooth flesh of roses. This was smoother than faces. And more compelling. The roses drowsed and drifted under her skin.

‘Theodora, I forbid you to touch the roses,' said Mrs Goodman.

‘I'm not,' cried Theodora. ‘Or only a little. Some of them are bad.'

And they were. There was a small pale grub curled in the heart of the rose. She could not look too long at the grub-thing stirring as she opened the petals to the light.

‘Horrid, beastly grub,' said Fanny, who was as pretty and as pink as roses.

Theodora had not yet learnt to dispute the apparently indisputable. But she could not condemn her pale and touching grub. She could not subtract it from the sum total of the garden. So, without arguing, she closed the rose.

Altogether this was an epoch of roselight. Morning was bigger than the afternoon, and round, and veined like the skin inside an unhatched egg, in which she curled safe still, but smiling for them to wake her, to touch her cheek with a finger and say: I believe Theodora is asleep. Then she would scream: I am not, I am not, and throw open her eyes to see who. Usually it was Father.

Or else you waited for Father to come out from behind his door. It was a solemn and emotional event. Your father is not to be disturbed, said Mother, which gave to his door a certain degree of awfulness. But Father himself was not awful. He was serious. He sighed a lot, and looked at you as if he were about to let you into a secret, only not now, the next time. Instead, and perhaps as compensation for the secret that had been postponed, he took you by the hand, about to lead you somewhere, only in the end you could feel, inside the hand, that you were guiding Father.

The room where Father sat was the side the pines were. It was plain as a white box, but filled with a dark murmuring of boughs, and the light was green and shifting that fell through pines. There was a little lamp that stood on Father's table. It had a thick green-glass shade and a shiny brass stand. It was a reading lamp. Your father is a one for books, sighed Gertie Stepper, as the flour crept up her arms and her face grew red from squeezing so much dough. The tone of Gertie Stepper's voice made it something sad and incurable, almost as if it were an illness, what Father did with books. And old books, foreign books, Gertie sighed; in this house it is always books, your mother too, only it is different in a lady. So you walked past Father's door with a sense of awfulness, especially as it was that
side of the house, where sometimes the pines, when the wind blew, flung themselves at the windows in throaty spasms.

If you went inside, Father was sitting with his chin on his chest, looking at books. He would sit like this for many hours, only his breath lifting his beard, as steady as a tree. Really Father was not unlike a tree, thick and greyish-black, which you sat beside, and which was there and not. Your thoughts drifted through the branches, or followed the up and down of the breathing that lifted Father's beard. He had grey eyes. Above the heavy grey-black thicket of the beard the eyes were light and clear. But they did not always look.

‘You must come in, Theodora,' Father said finally. ‘You must come in whenever you like, and take to books.'

‘Better a girl than a man,' said Gertie Stepper. ‘No one never lived off gingerbread.'

Which of course was silly. Gertie Stepper could talk rubbish, although she also Understood Life, and had been in seven situations since a girl. When Father asked you into his room and invited you to take down books, it was something to make you feel solemn.

If you could not understand the words of books, the names, the names sang, and you could touch the brown, damp paper with your hands. There were the foreign books too, which Father, Gertie said, used to read all the time. There were Herodotus and Homer. You asked, and Father said. He told you something funny. It was the bird that sat in the crocodile's throat. Fanning his larynx, Father said. Herodotus wrote this in a book. It was both funny and strange. And the crocodile lay in a river called the Nile, which flowed not far from Meroë.

‘But at Meroë there is only a creek,' Theodora said.

‘There is another Meroë,' said Father, ‘a dead place, in the black country of Ethiopia.'

Her hands were cold on the old spotted paper of the complicated books, because she could not, she did not wish to, believe in the second Meroë. She could not set down on the black grass of the country that was called Ethiopia their own yellow stone. In this dead place that Father had described the roses were as brown as paper bags, the curtains were ashy on their rings, the eyes of the house had closed.

‘I shall go outside now,' Theodora said.

Because she wanted to escape from this dead place with the suffocating cinder breath. She looked with caution at the yellow face of the house, at the white shells in its placid, pocked stone. Even in sunlight the hills surrounding Meroë were black. Her own shadow was rather a suspicious rag. So that from what she saw and sensed, the legendary landscape became a fact, and she could not break loose from an expanding terror.

Only in time the second Meroë became a dim and accepted apprehension lying quietly at the back of her mind. She was free to love the first. It was something to touch. She rubbed her cheek against the golden stone, pricked by the familiar fans and spirals of the embedded shells. It was Our Place. Possession was a peaceful mystery.

At Our Place
, wrote Theodora Goodman on a blank page,
there is an old apricot tree which does not have fruit, and here the cows stand when it is hot, before they are milked, or underneath the pear trees in the old orchard where the cottage has tumbled down. I see all these things when I ride about Our Place, with my Father. Our Place is a decent size, not so big as Parrotts' or Trevelyans', but my Father says big enough for peace of mind
.

‘Fetch your pony, too, Theo,' Father called, ‘and we shall ride round the place.'

So you did, riding just above the yellow grass, under the skeleton trees. Theodora sat straight, riding round Our Place with Father. She listened to the clinking of the stirrups, and the horses blowing out their nostrils, and the heavy, slow, lazy streams of sound that fell from the coarse hair of their swishing tails. Theodora looked at the land that was theirs. There was peace of mind enough on Meroë. You could feel it, whatever it was, and you were not certain, but in your bones. It was in the clothes-line on which the sheets drooped, in the big pink and yellow cows cooling their heels in creek mud, in magpie's speckled egg, and the disappearing snake. It was even in the fences, grey with age and yellow with lichen, that tumbled down and lay round Meroë. The fences were the last word in peace of mind.

Things were always tumbling down. Some things were done
up again with wire. But mostly they just lay.

And in this connection Theodora Goodman discovered that Our Place was not beginning and end. She met for the first time the detached eye.

‘Meroë?' said Mr Parrott. ‘Rack-an'-Ruin Hollow.'

Which Theodora heard. She was waiting for Father, in-town, under the long balcony of the Imperial Hotel. She hung around, waiting, and there were men there. She could smell their cloth, and the smell of drying horse sweat that left their leggings. The men stood in the shade of the Imperial Hotel. They spread their legs apart because they were important. They owned cattle and land. There was Mr Parrott, and old Mr Trevelyan, and Alby Poynter, and Ken Searle.

Goodman was a decent fellow, said old Mr Trevelyan, and he shook his head, though it usually shook, it was like that. Yes, said old Mr Trevelyan. It was bad. And the fences fallin' down.

‘All this gadding off to foreign places,' said Mr Parrott. ‘Sellin' off a paddock here and a paddock there. George Goodman has no sense of responsibility to his own land.'

This was awful. It made your stomach sick, to hear of Father, this, that you could not quite understand, but it was bad enough.

Then Father came out. He was wearing the old Panama hat. He was laughing at something good that had happened inside the Imperial Hotel. It was so good that Father had come to the surface, and his eyes saw. And she wanted to laugh too, but she could not. Her stomach was sick with the sense of responsibility that Father, they said, did not have.

‘So long, Ted, Alby,' Father called, nodding and laughing to the men. ‘Theo, where are you?'

‘So long, George. So long, Mr Goodman,' replied the men, as if nothing had been said.

It was all smiles. But Theodora Goodman was thin and yellow with shame.

‘Here I am, Father,' she said. ‘I waited here in the shade. The buggy is round the side.'

They drove home high in the buggy, between the black wheels, listening to the stones that they lashed up. Theodora sat with knotted hands. She was oppressed by a weight of sadness,
that nobody would lift, because nobody would ever know that she was shouldering it. Least of all Father, who was thick and mysterious as a tree, but also hollow, by judgement of the men beneath the balcony. Now she linked together what they said with remarks that Gertie Stepper made. I been all my life with practical people, Gertie said, punching at the dough.

The wheels of the buggy on the road from town thrashed the stones, and Father said, ‘Nothing to say, Theo?'

‘Why,' she said, ‘no.'

There was nothing to say. His nearness and the flashing of his Panama hat were hard enough to bear.

It was true what the men said, it was quite true. They had sold Long Acre, and Nissen's Selection, and Bald Hill.

‘I refuse to vegetate,' said Mrs Goodman. ‘Let us go somewhere. Before we die.'

Her voice struck the dining-room door, beyond which lamps had just been lit, and the big hambone still glittered, and the apple peel Fanny had thrown across her shoulder lay coiled on the carpet.

‘It's reckless, Julia,' Father said.

‘Then let us be reckless,' said Mother, and, the other side of the dining-room door, she must have tightened her mouth.

‘Let us be reckless,' she said. ‘And die. We can sell a paddock. Let us go to the Indies.'

Mother's voice burned the quiet air. It was stifling as an afternoon of fire.

Father laughed. ‘I suppose we can sell Long Acre,' he said. ‘Old Trevelyan's willing to buy.'