The Aunt's Story (29 page)

She could not love him enough. Theodora could not bear the beating in her throat. She was oppressed by a heavy music, a secret darkness of the trees, in which the sun just failed to glisten. Theodora watched Katina Pavlou's face in Wetherby's hands.

‘There,' said Wetherby. ‘If you cannot see.'

‘But I see! Why should I not? Oh, but it is good to kiss. The world is good.'

‘Oh, but the world is sick,' Wetherby said.

He began to cough for some afterthought.

‘You shall see as I do. Now it will be different. Because I shall love you,' said Katina Pavlou.

‘Yes, you shall love me,' said Wetherby.

But he began to walk away among the trees.

‘What's got into Wetherby? 'E's a queer one,' said Miss Grigg. ‘And thin. Wetherby wants feedin' up. Look at ‘im goin' off. A regular scarecrow. Perhaps ‘e's remembered or forgotten something.'

Lieselotte laughed. ‘Wetherby has forgotten what he wants. He has gone to look for it,' she said.

Miss Grigg sucked her teeth. ‘Some people never know,' she said. ‘Some people never know there's nothing like food. Now, Mrs Rapallo, won't you pick a wing of chicken? It's a pity your girl Gloria couldn't come.'

Theodora heard the stiff flutes miss, as Mrs Rapallo moved her parasol, dragging the crimson shadow across her face.

‘Donna Gloria,' said Lieselotte, behind her eyelids and their fierce stars, ‘was otherwise engaged in Rome.'

‘In Monte,' Mrs Rapallo corrected.

‘Mrs Rapallo, you say, in Monte!'

‘The Principessa arrived on the coast three or four days ago,' said Mrs Rapallo. ‘She will drive over one day for lunch.'

‘In the blue Delage,' said Lieselotte.

‘With the lacquered woodwork and the monograms,' added Miss Grigg with mounting rapture. ‘And the electric lighter, and the vase for roses.'

‘And her mother's monstrous egotism,' said the General, who was crushing eggs.

But Mrs Rapallo, who had in her day withstood the blows of marble and the eyes of children, Mrs Rapallo did not hear.

‘My daughter's rank,' she said, ‘requires certain appurtenances.'

‘My daughter's ice,' said the General, whose humility had begun to glitter.

‘Let us pick up the pieces, Miss Goodman,' suggested Lieselotte.

She began, with her small deft hands, which at times could appear innocent of motive, to gather the sodden cardboard, the fragments of food, and the emotional shreds of the paper napkins.

Then the picnic is finished, Theodora realized, rolling the hot napkins into a neat ball.

But not the sea. The sea had stretched out into the flat serenity of afternoon. The sea no longer folded and unfolded, offering between spasms the possibility of a drowned face. Blue opened and opened, fetched up the distance, quenched thought and
metal. Feebly resisting the moment of transparence, a paper napkin that someone had let float stroked the noses of fish.

‘Let us go now,' they said.

‘Yes,' they sighed. ‘Let us go.'

They took the baskets. It was a long stretch of sand, and between trees.

‘Katina, Katina, we are going,' called Miss Grigg.

‘Yes, I am coming,' Katina Pavlou said.

She followed the flat figures, but at a distance, because other lives are flat and external. Katina Pavlou trailed her hand against the trunks of trees.

‘What is it, Katina?' Theodora Goodman asked.

Though fingers told that questions were superfluous. The hands held the answer. The hands were hot.

‘It is nothing, Miss Goodman,' Katina Pavlou smiled. ‘Look at this blue. I am blind.'

Then they walked. Theodora knew that they had reached perfection. She felt Katina Pavlou, who was heavy and warm with some inner perfection of her own. But perfection, alas, is breakable, whether it is marble, or terracotta, or the more fragile groups of human statuary.

‘How far is Africa, do you suppose?' Katina Pavlou asked.

‘Far enough,' Theodora Goodman said.

O
FTEN
enough Theodora wondered whether it was time for her to go. There were days when faces did not open. She heard the hedge of knitting needles in the lounge. In the strict space of her
chambre modeste
, where
confort moderne
refused at times to flow, she opened the suitcase and smelled its emptiness. There was also the sheets of the
Corriere della Sera
she had used after losing her shoe-bag in Siena. But Theodora did not leave. The melancholy fact of emptiness was not enough. She waited for some act that still had to be performed.

Au mois d'avril il est gai
,
au mois de juin on mène une vie assez tranquille
,
au mois d'octobre l'air fait du bien
, Monsieur Durand used to say, to meet emergencies.

Monsieur Durand suggested seasons with the bland conviction of his own brochure. Because there are certain conventions of expression and behaviour to be observed, even by those guests who look out of windows, or yawn, or thoughtfully trace the veins of a plant.

That is all very well, and true, Monsieur Durand, Theodora would have said, but you forget how you bared your teeth one morning in the glass, and wondered whether their desperation would bite, or whether your tongue, branching suddenly and peculiarly from your mouth, might not be uprooted by the hand like any other fungus, all this you forget, Monsieur Durand, and that I saw, and how we agreed, in silence, that it was too insignificant to remember.

But Theodora did not say. She folded her receipt, for another week, gravely, edge to edge, and went outside, because it was inevitable, into the
jardin exotique
.

Pervading the stiff, and at the same time fleshy, forms of the garden, the morning was bright, cheerful, tinkling. The garden gave up no secrets, if it had secrets to give. Brooms had made correct patterns on the gravel, and the natural occurrences of dew and mist had sponged the pig's face and washed the aloe
down. There was no visible disorder, except that on the benches the occasional droppings of birds blinded with their whiteness, and from a cactus sword hung what was either a spider's web or an unfinished doily.

Theodora looked closer to discover which.

‘You are quite right, Miss Goodman,' Wetherby said. ‘It is six afternoons from the life of the Demoiselles Bloch. Doilies do escape.'

‘Oh,' said Theodora. ‘Yes.'

She was neither prepared nor altogether pleased. She picked the doily off the cactus, as if it were her duty to hide the meeker weaknesses of others. Reddening a little, she put it in her bag, to return later in the morning to its rightful reticule.

‘The Demoiselles Bloch,' she said, ‘often have trouble with their things.'

‘How right, how right,' said Wetherby.

He was reading the Continental
Daily Mail
. This morning he was a thin young man in a tweed coat, of which the elbows had leather patches. Under the thick forelock of nondescript hair, which gave him the expression of a goat that prefers to consume tins, his face absorbed news, while remaining superior to events. Wetherby was immune.

‘What is the news?' asked Theodora, because it was the least she could do to cover her dislike.

‘The body of a dancer has been discovered, in a parcel, in a cloakroom of the London tube,' Wetherby said. ‘The Führer is annexing somewhere else, and half America has turned to dust. Now, Miss Goodman, shall you go or stay?'

‘Then you do sometimes relate the personal to the universal,' Theodora said.

‘I am sometimes forced to, by the people who disapprove,' Wetherby replied. ‘But oh Lord, it is early. It is too early to plunge. My stomach is full of breakfast. Let us observe instead the advantages of our zinc surroundings. It is all that a garden ought to be, neat and not native, resourcefully planned, as opposed to dankly imaginative. Preserve me from the swish of dead leaves and urns full of torn letters.'

He was pleased by his own facetiousness, Theodora heard. Its bright metal cannoned down the paths.

‘But you are not pleased, Miss Goodman,' Wetherby said. ‘You will not be pleased while I am I.'

His squamous hands were increasing her disgust.

‘I could not be more indifferent,' Theodora said, ‘if you chose to be
x
or
y
.'

Algebra, she felt, with Lou, would remain her chiefest torture.

‘Tell me something, Miss Goodman. Tell me the truth. If I could have loved Katina Pavlou just as she leapt from your imagination, clothed in white, and all the nostalgia of what has never happened, then it might have been different.'

But now Theodora trembled for the dark. Now the garden raised its swords. She avoided Wetherby, but Wetherby pursued.

‘Perhaps in different circumstances I would have lain with my head in your lap, and discussed Tennyson and Morris. But the escalators have carried us apart. And now, Miss Goodman, the times have turned sour. I think I am right in saying of love that the most one can expect is the logical conclusion.'

Theodora laughed. Now she could not control her dark moustache. It was a fierce and hateful thing. But the eyes of Wetherby were clear as mirrors.

‘Not that one does not continue to hope,' he said. ‘I am obsessed.'

‘Yes, you will continue,' Theodora laughed. ‘You will love your obsession. You will love the faces of mirrors. You will love your own anxiety.'

Sitting on the bench in the
jardin exotique
, Theodora Goodman and Wetherby looked at each other, like two people coming out of a tunnel, rediscovering each other's features, as if there had been no exchange of darkness. He was a pale young man in a tweed coat. She was a sallow spinster of forty-five.

Wetherby looked at his wrist.

‘Soon it will be time for the postman,' he said. ‘I am expecting a letter from Muriel Leese-Leese. She keeps me here, you know, ostensibly for my health, though actually so that she may enjoy the pleasure of torturing herself by correspondence. She is lost without her daily twinge.'

‘And after that,' said Theodora, ‘you will find it is time for lunch. How the morning passes.'

Wetherby folded the
Daily Mail
.

‘I shall not be here for lunch,' he said. ‘I am going to walk along the coast with Katina Pavlou, to the round tower which has some connection with Napoleon.'

‘It has, they say,' Theodora said.

The tower to which the Demoiselles Bloch walked occasionally, in strong boots and overcoats. Theodora herself had never been as far as the tower, but she suspected it. Especially now. She suspected the dark smell of damp stone and possibly a dead bird. She loathed the folded body of the dead bird, and the maggots in its eyes.

Disgust knotted her hands.

‘All right. It was no choice of mine,' Wetherby said. ‘None of it.'

As if he had noticed the twitching of her dark moustache.

Alone, Theodora listened to the morning pass. She walked in the garden. She would have chosen an acacia, of which the green shade covers with superior benevolence, but the garden did not cater for emotional states, least of all desperation. The garden encouraged exposure, and then contained it, with all the indifference of zinc.

There were greater commotions too. There was the commotion of the electric current. Miss Grigg stood in the hall. She held the electric iron. She held it for Monsieur Durand to see, as if it might explain something of which exasperation was incapable. Miss Grigg said that in no hotel of any standing, in no hotel in which she had ever stayed, had the electric current been cut off quite so frequently. Miss Goodman would bear her out, that such things did not happen in hotels. It was not possible for ladies to press their slips.

Monsieur Durand looked sadly at Miss Grigg's iron, which did not after all explain, any more than words.

‘It is the municipal power,' said Monsieur Durand, ‘that does not for the moment circulate, but which will circulate again.'

In the lounge, under the pink lampshade, a hand was practising a gavotte, each note white and separate that it picked up.

Do you know, Miss Grigg, Theodora wanted to say, the music has not begun yet?

But it was not possible, just as it is not possible to convince certain faces that a murder is being done in the next room.

So instead she said, ‘Yes, Miss Grigg. It is just as Monsieur Durand says. He is not the municipal power. And the current will circulate again.'

So that Miss Grigg was cut. She was left holding her inarticulate iron. Her face was flat and functionless.

‘But all the same, one expects,' she said, ‘to find what the prospectus puts in words. In the best 'otels. In the 'Otel Excelsior, at Chamonix, they even 'ad an electric device for pushin' the snow off the window sills.'

Theodora listened to the hand, round the corner in the lounge, pick up each white, separate note of the gavotte. Each note trembled tentatively, fell, was gathered again, to glisten. The music flowed into a surer music, whiter and lighter.

‘Katina,' called Miss Grigg. ‘You remember the 'Otel Excelsior? And the little trouts? Trouts with their tails in their mouths.'

‘No, Grigg, it was the Hôtel des Alpes,' said Katina Pavlou round the corner in the lounge.

The voice blurred, as the music doubled on its underwater self, with the glistening surety of snow water, a bluish white, joyful and perpetual as mountain water. Katina Pavlou lifted her hands and the music fell, sure, and pure, and painfully transparent. So that any possible disaster of age or experience must drown in music. Disasters, the music implied, are reserved for observers, the drowning drown. Caught in this iciness of music, Theodora felt the breath stop in her throat. She went inside the little wintergarden and closed the door.

‘It is difficult to escape from music. Music pursues.'

It was General Sokolnikov, of course, who sat beneath a palm. In the steamy atmosphere of the little wintergarden the palm relaxed in rubber strips, as the General ponderously licked a postage stamp.

‘You must realize, Ludmilla, that you cannot close doors.'

It was true. Even in the little wintergarden music sluiced leaf and frond. It trembled in distinct drops on the pots of maidenhair.

‘
You
must realize, General,' said Theodora, ‘that something has happened, or will.'

She held her front, afraid that her dress might not ultimately contain her agitation.

‘As if I didn't,' said Sokolnikov. ‘The municipal authorities have cut the municipal current. It is a habit that they have.'

Then it is not possible, Theodora knew, it is not possible to tell.

And now the General was engaged in the act of extraction. He was easing the stamp from his tongue.

‘I was writing to my ex-wife, Edith,' he said.

Not without some distaste for his tongue, some suspicion of fish. Carefully parting the leaves of a begonia, Alyosha Sergei Sokolnikov spat.

‘We have adopted this peculiar convention of two people exchanging letters,' the General said, past an excess of tongue. ‘We describe our digestions and the weather. In this way we cherish what remains of an unfortunate relationship. In this way it is easier to impose the reality one chooses.'

‘Then, there are many?' said Theodora.

‘What questions you ask! Though you, of course, are different.'

His voice hesitated to disperse air. He made her thin, though she was, she realized. Her dress stirred only in a wind of music and words.

‘Yes,' said the General softly. ‘You, Ludmilla, you are an illusion. You died years ago in the forests of Russia.'

She was almost ready to agree.

‘Then, thank you, Alyosha Sergei,' she said, ‘thank you for accepting this illusion.'

‘Oh, illusions are necessary. It is necessary to accept. I shall tell you a secret. Incidentally. I was a major once. Also a colonel. Perhaps.'

‘Then you have deceived us,
Major
?' Theodora said.

‘Deceit, Ludmilla, is a wincing word. I was a general in spirit, always. If I was not in fact, it was due to misfortune, and the superior connections of my subordinate officers. But how I have lived, in spirit. Such bugles!'

There was no further note in the Hôtel du Midi. It was quite
still. How long this might continue seemed to Theodora to depend on Sokolnikov and the furniture.

‘In time it will be time for lunch,' he sighed, examining the envelope as if he doubted the address.

‘I do not expect to be here for lunch,' Theodora said. ‘I am going out. I am going to put on my hat.'

‘Why?' asked Sokolnikov, ‘why put on your hat if your haste is so indecent?'

‘Alyosha Sergei,' Theodora said, ‘you do not know.'

So that the windows quivered, and a grey cloud, blowing out of Corsica.

‘Oh, but I do,' said Alyosha Sergei.

He sat in a deflated heap.

‘They have taken the coast road,' he said. ‘They are walking towards the tower which has some connection with Napoleon. He has taken her hand because she expects him to. And although his hand is dead, she is moved, because the music is still moving in her own. It does not much matter whether it is he. Because she has chosen. She has chosen this as the moment of experience. And experience has a glaze. It has not yet
cracked
,' the General almost shouted.

Theodora Goodman began to circumnavigate the furniture.

‘At least my feet can move,' Theodora said.

‘Yes,' said Sokolnikov. ‘And I do not wish to deter you. You can also create the illusion of other people, but once created, they choose their own realities.'

All that afternoon Theodora Goodman, walking hatless between houses, past trees, near the fragments of stone walls from which lizards looked, heard the words of Sokolnikov. Like rubber they departed and returned. Now her motives were equally elastic, because Sokolnikov had made her doubt. So she could not take the direct road. Roads did not lead through the infinite landscape in which she hesitated, least of all the obvious red coast road. As the town thinned out into advertisements and tins, she wandered higher, where the needle turrets of signorial villas were strangled by roses, and the night club still wore its daylight tarnish. She walked on the edge of the lavender hills.