The Aunt's Story (28 page)

Since the night of the nautilus she had shrunk. But she came. She came to the picnic, still dubious whether grass offered much
beyond moisture, and whether the elaborate machinery of the waves would soothe.

‘I shall put myself here,' she said, patting an orange rock with scorn.

Mrs Rapallo had to settle her magenta, compose her crimson, tilt her great jaundiced hat, before she could suffer the sun, if only obliquely, from under her parasol.

‘There,' she said. ‘There is now some design in nature.'

And she sniffed at the red trunk of an offending pine.

Soon the landscape had begun to fit. The air withdrew its obliviousness. It stroked. The sea moulded the human form into tolerant shapes. How far the sun condescended was seen in the face of Katina Pavlou, its open, golden petals, with the dark seeds for eyes. Theodora waited for Katina's eyes to germinate. She watched for the expanding of some mystery that she had already guessed at and rejected.

‘If you open your hand I shall tell you a fortune,' said Wetherby as he reached forward and took the fingers of Katina Pavlou.

‘No,' she said. ‘There is still eating to be done.'

She withdrew her hand. She could not answer for the behaviour of her bones.

‘How right you are,' Lieselotte laughed.

She lay on her back, chewing with her small teeth the sweetness from a piece of grass.

‘Wetherby cannot resist the telling of fortunes,' Lieselotte said. ‘To tell his own fortune in other hands. He is the original interpreter of mirrors. Am I not right?' she said, turned.

‘You are always right,' said Wetherby.

But he did not propose to investigate the degrees of hate. Sun destroys self. For the moment he could accept his nothing. He wondered also, a little, at the hot skin, purple-stained, which had just escaped from his own hand.

‘Katina! Come on, Katina!' Miss Grigg commanded. ‘It is your duty to see that guests are supplied with paper napkins and cardboard plates.'

‘Of course,' Katina said.

She took from her skirt the hand that she had held clenched to contain her secret, and which, spread for a fortune, would have palpitated like a leaf.

Theodora put stones, one at each corner, to hold the tablecloth. It was a neat, solemn duty that she liked. There was a bounty hinted at, and a shape, even if ultimately unachieved by human intercourse. Man's machinery fails, she suspected, beside the more sinuous reasoning of the waves. She heard the crimson protest of Mrs Rapallo's parasol drowning in blue, and blue, and still deeper blue.

‘My eyes are not made for this,' complained Mrs Rapallo. ‘I cannot see. What do you suppose has happened, Theodora Goodman? When I was a girl I could see the gum oozing out of bark. I could watch the red cabbage bugs playing at love. The sun was a ball of fire, at which I could stare without fear or discomfort.'

It is from long looking at a wall, Mrs Rapallo, Theodora would have said, but refrained.

So Mrs Rapallo sulked, and her eyelids oozed, and she tilted her parasol at the sun.

‘Let me press you to a sandwidge, Mrs Rapallo,' coaxed Miss Grigg. ‘Or a
croaky de poison
. There's nothing like food. And sea adds salt.'

Miss Grigg's enthusiasm ran red under her white twill.

‘Picnics,' she said, ‘are nice. When I was with the family of the late Colonel de Saumarez, M.B.E., at Winchester, picnics were the order of the day. We used to take our lunch into the forest, to Lymington. The late Colonel was a jolly man. 'E could tell a tale like nobody's business. No one had shot so many tigers, or stuck such pigs, or 'ooked such wopping sharks. I was devoted to 'is kids, Lilian and little 'Enry, though 'Enry went to the pack.'

Miss Grigg fanned a fly away from the niceness over which she presided by right and nature, the egg sandwiches and sausage rolls, the chicken wings and pale aspic prawns. But nastiness always dares. So she frowned, and shooed, and protected the cloth, where her soul lay sliced and open on a cardboard plate.

‘Yes. Poor little 'Enry. 'Enry was a love. Used to like to chase the pigs. 'E said the pigs wore combinations. Would you believe it! At Lymington, of course, the wild pigs were tame, not like the ones the Colonel stuck abroad. And Lilian sat beneath the trees, as nice as nice. Lilian was lovely. She took a lord, and turned stout in the end. But what 'appened to 'Enry is something
we shall never know. First 'e blows 'is fortune, then 'is brains, in a bedroom in Bayswater. All 'e left was a note on the washstand to say 'e was in 'is right mind. Tt-tt-ttt,' sighed Miss Grigg. ‘Countess, can't I tempt you to an egg?'

‘Thank you,' said Lieselotte, ‘I have eaten.'

‘Lord!' said Miss Grigg squarely. ‘I 'aven't begun.'

But Lieselotte, Theodora saw, was engulfed in some personal disaster, that was also perhaps little 'Enry's. Lieselotte read the letter on the washstand written in her own familiar writing.

‘The castle in which we lived was full of such events,' said Lieselotte. ‘They were called a sacred German
Pflicht
.'

‘And what is this German
Flick
?' asked Miss Grigg.

‘It is something that cannot be explained in any other language. It is a kind of upsurging of the German bowels.'

‘Well I never!' said Miss Grigg.

‘But I failed to upsurge. Although Rudi handed me the gun himself. He called it the benefit of honour. I couldn't. Even when he dictated the letter I should write.'

‘Your 'usband was a wrong 'un. Downright bad,' said Miss Grigg.

Lieselotte fingered bread.

‘Only bread is good, Katina Pavlou,' said Lieselotte.

Katina Pavlou did not hear. There was no reason why she should. Sun had undone her bones. Her body had learnt a suppleness of water. Suddenly she bent and mingled.

‘You are not eating,' she said. ‘You are bored. But the best part is still to come. We have wild strawberries and sour cream.'

She blushed. She would have called him by some intimate name, touching without hands. But since discovering in a book that he was called Lionel Aloysius, she blushed. She was ashamed for him.

‘I?' Wetherby asked.

He was not altogether sure. He turned his face. Now the sun was suspect.

Theodora Goodman smiled, knowing that for Wetherby the truth resided in Birmingham. She also heard the squirming of the paper rose. If I am to take and break this child, Wetherby would have said, the suffering will not be mine.

‘I was thinking,' Wetherby said.

‘Of what?' Katina Pavlou asked.

Oh, well, he supposed, if it was to happen.

‘I was thinking,' he said, ‘that I had not noticed the two brown moles on the lobe of one of your ears.'

This is so easy, he said. He smiled at the sea. But it was not Wetherby. He smiled for the clerks in parks who expose themselves regularly, in words, on benches.

Katina Pavlou touched the crumbs. ‘I hate my moles,' she said.

‘But they are so right, Katina Pavlou.'

Wetherby, speaking the right words, could read the smile on Lieselotte's face. It was his own scar, his own hatefulness.

‘I hate my moles,' Katina Pavlou said.

As if she could not love enough all that lived and breathed. Theodora knew Katina Pavlou's smile. Trees sprang suddenly from rocks and sand, the first trees. Her arms parted the waves. Katina's face had opened, Theodora saw.

Mrs Rapallo cleared her throat, from a long way down. She stirred. She touched her orange rock, groping for the plush that was not there.

‘Moles can be removed,' Mrs Rapallo announced. ‘With an electric needle. Painlessly. I remember Maxine Bosanquet had one in an awkward place. Otherwise she was perfect. Maxine was famous for her skin. And pearls. Pearls seemed to feast off her. Many of us lent her our necklaces to be refreshed. What a glow they returned with! I was always death to pearls,' Mrs Rapallo said.

She shook her shoulders for some unpleasantness, both far and close. She felt, and turned. Painfully prizing open her eyelids, she looked and said, ‘I guessed as much. The monster is approaching. After all.'

‘Why, yes, it is the General,' said Katina Pavlou.

Under a handkerchief that he had knotted into a cap, the General flamed. The air was full of displeasure, Theodora heard, as he sweated closer through the trees. Twigs were snapping. Sand slurred. The rock suggested great gurglings of subterranean water, as if the sea were protesting in the belly of the earth. Over his waistcoat he wore, to contain himself, or to celebrate the occasion, an enormous gold chain.

‘General, you are on fire,' Lieselotte called. ‘Come, and we shall put you out with crushed strawberries.'

‘I am in no condition,' wheezed Sokolnikov, as he pressed between the last trees.

‘At your age you should take care,' said Lieselotte, quietly squeezing the head off an ant.

He heard. He stood on the edge of the clearing, handling himself tenderly. He was conscious of his ridiculousness. For a moment Theodora feared that, possessed by some demon of jollity, Sokolnikov might crow. If he had lost his paper nose, the cap was still knotted on his glistening fat.

‘Oh, I shall do nothing to shame you,' said Alyosha Sergei. ‘I shall not die.'

No, remarked Mrs Rapallo, obliquely under her parasol, no, she said, he was not the kind.

‘Come,' Alyosha Sergei,' Katina Pavlou said, and went, ‘you shall sit beside me, because I love you.'

And she did. Now Katina Pavlou loved the world. She reached upward like the black and serious branches of the pines, outward like the all-embracing sea, she was self-contained as rock. See, I can see, her eyes said, as she touched the ridiculous arm of Sokolnikov. She could afford to love his ridiculousness, but he recognized the touch of charity.

‘Thank you, Varvara, you are kind,' said Alyosha Sergei solemnly. ‘I think also you have grown.'

‘I am wearing higher heels,' Katina said.

Even if it only half explained, it was necessary to say. Dry words can nourish.

It was as necessary as food. Theodora knew, pushing towards Sokolnikov the hard-boiled eggs. It was necessary that Sokolnikov should feel the final twinge. It was necessary that Katina Pavlou should discover fire. And Theodora Goodman, watching the charade move with all the hopes and hesitations of the human mechanism, knew that because she loved and pitied, the humiliation and the pain were also necessarily hers.

‘Thank you, Ludmilla, for your kindness,' said Sokolnikov, accepting eggs.

Today his voice was old, and he looked with surprise to see in his hands eggs. He would beat together in his hands, to crack,
two of the hard-boiled eggs, but it was no less strange. The cap cocked to listen. He could not have been more amazed if the sound had come from billiard balls.

‘On the estate of a female relative, Anna Stepanovna, who died in what may have been the necessary revolution, who shall say, there was an old man called Grishka, who had a little hen,' said the voice of Sokolnikov.

But it was not the hour of much attention, so nobody listened to Alyosha Sergei. Sea lulled the bodies into fresh attitudes of anticipation, sleep, and melancholy. Directly under the sun the rocks, orange and stubborn, were painfully oblivious. Mrs Rapallo, clawing through kid, felt the prick of limpets. Sun fell through the slats of the pines, or revolved in catherine wheels on the inner flaps of the eyelids. Lieselotte counted many such revolving planets. Contentment was close, and coloured, and hot as sand.

‘I believe you are going to dislike me, Miss Goodman,' Wetherby said.

He turned on her, on his elbows, his full face that was reminiscent of a pale 'cello.

‘I have reached the age of tolerance,' said Theodora. ‘It is agreeably compact. Everything fits in, in time.'

‘This little hen was loved by Grishka,' said Alyosha Sergei, who was already making mountains out of eggshells. ‘She had a cunning eye. She would sit on his chest, and pick grains of corn from out of his beard.'

‘I would still accuse you of disliking me, Miss Goodman,' said Wetherby, ‘if I did not dislike myself.'

‘Then, if it is that way,' Theodora said.

But because she did not lay on his forehead the cool hand of sympathy, which was his due, he went among the trees. She could hear him breaking twigs.

‘And when they held her up without her feathers, ready for the pot, as Anna Stepanovna insisted, although she was only a stringy little hen, old Grishka cried.'

‘Oh, chook, chook, chook! Dearest General, you have been telling a story,' said Lieselotte, ‘and we have lost the thread.'

‘I flattered myself I was entertaining the company with a few reminiscences, however humble,' the General said.

Mrs Rapallo held her glove to shield her face, of which the skin was stretched tighter than a drum.

Theodora watched Katina Pavlou go among the trees. She could see her white, crushed skirt. She could not hear, but in her own throat Theodora felt the words.

‘Why have you gone away from us?' Katina Pavlou asked. ‘You are hurt, or irritated.'

Theodora felt the words. She saw the face of Katina Pavlou, where the sun fell between the trunks of the serious pines, the face waiting to give some token of love, or even to receive hurt.

‘I went, Katina, because I did not like myself,' Wetherby said.

Theodora knew the words. She watched him take Katina Pavlou's fingers, and read his own mind into the purple stains.

‘I shall like you,' said Katina Pavlou. ‘If you will let me.'

‘I should love you, Katina,' Wetherby said.

He watched her fingers tremble in his hand.

‘There is no need,' said Katina Pavlou. ‘If you will let me, I shall love you enough. If you will let me show you.'

‘I don't think you understand,' he said, ‘all that it implies.'

‘Why should I understand?' Katina Pavlou said. ‘I
know
!'