The Aunt's Story (12 page)

Miss Stevenson with the gold tooth shuddered, and fingered the top of her glove. She always avoided murders, she said. There were so many nice things in the world.

‘But to think,' said Mrs Ewart. ‘Those three little girls. They looked such nice little girls. The three. If only it had been one. Or even two.'

‘That, Connie,' said Mrs Goodman, ‘is irrelevant detail. We were discussing the ethics of the case.'

Mr Clarkson said the whole incident had been distorted out of its true proportion, and the room listened, because he was a man. The Jack Frost murders had struck a chord of mass hysteria, which was always waiting to sound, and now particularly, since the war, since people had been left high and dry by other horrors. Now the individual was free to take the centre of the stage again and dramatize himself.

‘Don't you agree, Miss Goodman?' asked Mr Clarkson.

He was a bald man, with strong, clean hands.

‘Partly,' said Theodora. ‘It is very personal. I find it difficult. Quite honestly. Difficult to discuss. I have thought about it. And it is still so close. Like something one has done oneself.'

Mrs Goodman cleared some phlegm from her throat in an exasperated, throaty spasm.

‘Theodora, Mr Clarkson, sometimes has pretensions to be unusual,' Mrs Goodman said.

‘It is understandable that Miss Goodman should feel as she does,' said Mr Clarkson.

And he straightened a pearl that pinned his tie.

Theodora did not hear this, as she had gone out on to the balcony. In the room she had been disturbed, by its various undertones, and Mr Clarkson, he was the most disturbing of all, because kindness wears an expression that expects truth. Now she stood by herself on the cramped lower balcony, from which it was barely possible to see the bay. The landscape at which she looked was quite devoid of complexity. There was a smooth breeze in the big Moreton Bay fig. The afternoon was, in fact, as settled as the voices of middle age that murmured through the glass door, except that Theodora continued to see Jack Frost's irreproachable façade, through which Frost himself had finally dared to pitch the stone.

Then Mr Clarkson came outside. Miss Goodman, he could see, was in a state of nerves. Her skin jumped.

‘I came out here to get the air,' she said.

Her silence added that she hoped she would be left. But Mr Clarkson, who had the smooth texture and the smoky smell of rich, thick-set men of forty, did not hear silences.

‘I like your view, Miss Goodman,' Mr Clarkson said. ‘It is my view reversed. If I stand on my balcony I can see yours. There, you see, the yellow house, beside the church.'

And he pointed at a square of stone, in a blur of trees, on the ridge that formed the opposite arm of the bay.

‘You must come one day and see for yourself.'

‘Thank you,' she said. ‘I go out very little.'

‘All the more reason then.'

His voice compelled her to make the balcony her universe, outside which the sound of trees swam, words in the room, and the ripple of a dove. It would be very easy, she felt, to allow the kindness, the affluence, the smoky voice of Mr Clarkson to engulf. But because of this she resisted. She could feel her neck, under its lace frill, stiffen into bone. She hoped, with both her hands, to take refuge in her ugliness. Now she summoned it up from all the reflections that had ever faced her in the glass.

‘You will not find me very good company, Mr Clarkson,' said Theodora Goodman's mouth.

That she turned on him, her dark lips, that made a thin seam in the yellow skin. There were moments, said Huntly Clarkson, when Theodora Goodman was no longer scraggy, her head a strange dark flower on its long stem, but defensive, with a strange dark smell, like a lily that folds its lips secretively on a fly.

‘This question of company,' he said, ‘is something for me to decide. The people who love us have a habit of sticking on labels that are never acceptable, and very seldom correct.'

‘Oh, and this is my daughter Theodora,' Mrs Goodman had said. ‘Of course, you will know my younger girl, Fanny Parrott. At her mother-in-law's. Fanny is a great favourite. With everyone.'

Mrs Goodman had let all this escape through her veil, in a last gasp of breath, the first morning, after the stairs. She wanted, she said, advice on many little things, none of them important, but still, it is always comforting to know that there is somebody to ask. Mrs Parrott had suggested, implied Mrs Goodman, that Mr Clarkson would offer that comfort and advice. Mr Clarkson agreed, amiably, above his desk, which was prosperous and broad, and at which he could already feel the
tyranny of Mrs Goodman aimed. He noticed that she was a small, neat, hateful woman, with small, neat, buckled shoes, and many rings. She sat in the light and kept her ankles crossed. But her daughter sat in shadow, and drew with her parasol on the floor characters that he could not read. The daughter's face was shadow under her large and timeless hat. Her clothes were quiescent and formalized as stone.

‘Then we shall see something of each other,' Mrs Goodman commanded. ‘I shall expect you at our house.'

So it had come to that. On the balcony. In the afternoon.

‘He is my solicitor,' said Mrs Goodman to Mrs Ewart and the gold-toothed Miss Stevenson. ‘He is Dolly Armstrong's nephew. He is rich. He is a widower. Yes, I believe it was sad. Quite young. But there you are. He has everything else in life. His house is full of exquisite things.'

‘Tell us, Julia, now,' asked Mrs Ewart, ‘is Theo interested at all? Poor Theo. It would be nice.'

‘I am too discreet to ask,' Mrs Goodman said. ‘But Theodora is a fool. She is a stick with men.'

Miss Stevenson tweaked at the top of her glove. Her position had grown delicate.

‘I only thought,' said Mrs Ewart, ‘it would be so nice.'

‘But what would Mr Clarkson want with Theodora?' Mrs Goodman asked.

‘If you would come,' said Mr Clarkson, ‘I would show you my fox terriers. I would ask you to lunch.'

Doves drowsed in the afternoon, in the sea glaze. This, felt Theodora, should be delightful if one knew how.

‘You are very kind, Mr Clarkson,' she said. ‘Shall we go inside?'

And they did. They walked back into the conversation of the old women, behind which Theodora hid her indecisions. Then, saying something about a handkerchief, she went to her room, and stayed while voices combined in the hall, dawdled, and diminished.

The door banged twice, the permanently loose letter-box, before Mrs Goodman called, ‘Theo, where are you? Going off like that. Everyone wondered if you were ill. You are a strange girl.'

In her mind Mrs Goodman had already roughed out several
landscapes, in which a younger, more exquisite version of herself stood in the foreground, holding Huntly Clarkson's arm, whereas, in fact, she sat on her drawing-room sofa and thoughtfully moistened her lips. Reality struggled with her fantasy. She was consumed.

‘I went up to my room,' Theodora said, ‘because I was bored.'

‘If that is the case, it was rude,' said Mrs Goodman.

But because she did not believe, she burned.

‘An odd impression it will make on Mr Clarkson.'

‘Mr Clarkson asked me to lunch.'

‘You will go of course,' said Mrs Goodman.

She could not wait for the answer, to feel her anger or contempt.

‘I don't know yet,' said Theodora, ‘whether I shall go or not.'

She would have liked to repay his kindness with a frank gesture of acceptance, the kind of gesture that Huntly Clarkson would expect, and get, from some woman of complexion, shadowless in a blue dress. The kind of woman who would receive a diamond brooch in a velvet box without a performance of gaucherie, who would press the hand that gave. Theodora remembered Huntly Clarkson's hands, which were large and clean. The hands had rested on the stucco balustrade, waiting to give. But she could not, she thought, take, and regret rushed at her, so that she had to write:

In this way Theodora Goodman went to the house of Huntly Clarkson, which stood in a blaze of laurels, a rich house, full of the glare of mahogany and lustre. The floors shone. There was an air of ease that disguised the industry which achieved this state. The servants were silent and well oiled. If they did not speak, it was because they had learnt their functions too well. They had a kind of silent contempt for anyone who did not understand what these functions were. So the servants of Huntly Clarkson looked at the shoulders of this woman helping herself to a cutlet, and condemned her as she tried to thank. Her glance
was indication of her income and her status. She was a woman of no account, whose clothes were not of this or any fashion, whose face was ageless in appearance, though they would have put her somewhere in the thirties.

‘I did not ask anyone else,' said Huntly Clarkson, ‘because you didn't suggest you wanted them.'

‘How not suggest?' she said, dazed by the noises the silver made on the table. ‘At the time I was a blank. You have read things off me that were never there. Really. I assure you.'

But there was a kind of ease between them. She began to think that it might be a pleasant thing, a friendship with Huntly Clarkson, if she could resist his house, his servants, and his furniture. These were all magnificently assured. They fixed time in the present. Even the old things inherited from grandfathers and aunts, even these pandered to Huntly Clarkson and the present, as if they began and ended as part of his upholstery. She looked at the rich, shining, well-covered body of Huntly Clarkson and wondered if he would exist without his padding.

‘When you are not the solicitor I know, what do you do?' she asked.

‘I enjoy myself,' he said. ‘It would be tempting to do this all the time. If one hadn't a kind of puritan misgiving. But outside this I succeed very well. I eat rich food. I smoke cigars. I go on an average of once a week to the races. I give dinner parties, which are sometimes boring, but there is always the spectacle of smart women with bare shoulders and diamonds.'

‘I have never done any of these things,' said Theodora. ‘I wonder why you have asked me?'

‘That is why,' Huntly Clarkson said.

He laughed, but as if he were a little puzzled by his cleverness. As if he had thought that he knew, and then discovered he did not.

‘I collect,' he said, ‘unusual objects. I have the signatures of four English kings. I have the breviary of Maximilian of Mexico and a ball of hair that was cut out of the stomach of a cat.'

Then she laughed, too, because he made her warm and dashing, almost as if her shoulders were bare, and she flashed like a spray of diamonds.

‘I see,' she laughed, ‘there is very little you haven't got.'

‘Yes,' he agreed. ‘And the odd part of it is, I am perfectly happy.'

He bent forward to confide, so that she looked into his well-shaved skin, and smelled the smell of rich, urbane men, which was new to her. Huntly Clarkson described happiness, and it was something you could touch. She drew back a little, almost afraid he might expect her to. But it was very delightful, and afterwards, sitting on the veranda, in a lull of wine, when the little fox terriers came, jumping, flirting, flashing, worrying, and prancing on their thin white wooden legs.

‘I hope you will come often,' Huntly Clarkson said. ‘I would like you to meet my friends.'

It brushed cold along her skin. To sit alone in the drawing-room surrounded by the bare, diamond women.

‘I would never be very good at these things,' said Theodora Goodman.

‘Just as you think,' he said.

But she was sad, because she could feel that he had sat back.

And he had. He felt that he had eaten too much. He was bored by dogs, and the prospect of the office, and Theodora Goodman. Why had he asked Theodora Goodman to his house? If it was out of pity it was praiseworthy. He often did praiseworthy things. But he was tired of himself. He wanted to loll right back and listen to something extraordinary as he fell asleep.

‘Have you ever seen a volcano?' she asked. ‘I would like to sail past in a ship, preferably at night.'

He opened his eyes.

‘Why, yes,' he said. ‘I have seen Vesuvius and Etna. And Stromboli. That from a ship. They were not so very extraordinary. None of them,' he said.

The green blaze of laurels crackled. Now she knew that she would go. It was easier to escape than she expected, from where she had never belonged.

But it settled down into being one of those relationships it is difficult to explain, a kind of groove in which minds fit, though not visible from outside. This persisted for some years.

‘Theo and Mr Clarkson see quite a lot of each other,' hesitated Mrs Ewart hopefully.

‘Theodora and Mr Clarkson,' said Mrs Goodman, ‘are friends.
Though why, it is difficult to say. Theo is an admirable girl, although I am her mother, but not of Huntly Clarkson's world.'

Oh, no. Mrs Goodman, even at her age, sat erect. She sat perpetually at a dinner table. She could have acted so many lives so much better than the actors. For this reason she resented the voice of Huntly Clarkson asking for Theodora on the telephone.

If reasons were not within the grasp of Mrs Ewart or Mrs Goodman, nor were they altogether apparent to Huntly Clarkson or Theodora Goodman themselves. I suppose, said Theodora, if I responded to clothes it would be something the same. All the rich and sinuous sensations of silk and sables would not have been unlike the hours spent with Huntly Clarkson, which smelled of cigars, and brilliantine, and leather. The sensations that Huntly Clarkson gave were no less voluptuous for being masculine.

‘Theodora,' Huntly Clarkson said, ‘let us go to the races, let us lunch at a hotel.'

She watched them stand champagne in silver buckets.