The Aunt's Story (13 page)

‘I believe you are not impressed,' said Huntly Clarkson.

‘No,' she said. ‘I am the soul of shabbiness.'

But her mouth denied what sometimes she would have accepted. The world was plated, after all.

If Huntly Clarkson invited Theodora again, and often he said he would not, that it gave no return, he invited her because of some indefinable uneasiness and discontent, a sense of something that he had not yet achieved. This was in no way connected with what the eager and the innocent would call love. Shaving himself in his undervest on those clear, fine aggressive mornings, when the flesh feels firmer, less fat, Huntly Clarkson laughed. It was not love. Huntly Clarkson had loved as far as he was capable, and finished. Love and Theodora Goodman were, besides, grotesque, unless you were prepared to explore subtler variations of emotion than he personally would care for. Standing in his well-planned bathroom, he shaved his face thoughtfully. He listened to the rasp of the razor on the surface of his skin and admired the clean passage it made through the soap.

Huntly Clarkson did not go to church. He collected pictures, for their value. Sometimes he listened to music, but as a logical stage in developing the evening after dinner. If he experienced
malaise, he usually put it down to physical condition. He took things for it. But when, in the midst of his well-planned bathroom, on a clear, clean, sharp morning, shouting with nickel taps, his mind pursued the foggy paths, out of the sun, in all elusiveness, he did not turn to bottles. He chose the telephone. I shall go when I have shaved, he said, and subject myself once more to Theodora Goodman. I shall catch on to the dry thread of her voice, that does not compensate. I shall subject myself, he said, that is the word. But if he felt less complacent, he also felt relieved.

Sometimes on the telephone he still attempted even to buy her with brilliance.

‘And by the way,' said Huntly Clarkson, ‘you will come on Tuesday. To dinner. To help with Moraïtis.'

From behind her diffidence Theodora said she would. It was touching and amusing, though unconvincing, to be reminded one is indispensable. But this, she said, is the convention in which Huntly lives. The same voice would speak the same words to Marion Neville and Elsa Boileau, summoning them to some imaginary rescue, and this was commonly called charm. So Theodora armed herself with irony. She would go. She would sit just outside the blaze of diamonds, assisting at a social function, the dinner for Moraïtis, who would give a series of four concerts, to which Marion Neville and Elsa Boileau, who
loved
music, would go. Theodora probably would not. She had entered a stretch of years in which she chose flatness.

When she arrived at the house, in which all the lights had been lit, so that it was quite hollow, she knew that the dinner would take place in spite of Moraïtis. He was a small dark man, opaque, bald, and physical, who smiled the propitiating smiles for words only half understood. Already Moraïtis had begun to hope that it would soon be over.

Marion Neville had a cousin, she said, who had been on a cruise to Greece, and had brought back some very beautiful embroidery from one of those islands, she forgot which, where the sanitation was quite appalling, and everyone got tummy troubles, though Esmé was fortunately provided with some indispensable pills, she forgot what.

Greece was a primitive country, said Moraïtis.

But he made it a sad virtue. He was a Greek with sad eyes. He waited for the women to talk about music, because women, a certain kind, do talk about music, and these were they. He looked in rather a tired, dispassionate way at the body of Elsa Boileau, which was passive, and brown, and almost fully exposed. Moraïtis waited for what she was bound to say.

‘Of course we are all looking forward to your concerts,' Mrs Boileau said. ‘Because we get very little that is good. So seldom the real artistes. We had D'Alvarez, of course. Most striking. She changed her dress I don't know how many times during the performance. By the way, Marion, Sybil
is
wearing what I said she was. Madeleine's model, which isn't. Such a scream.'

Paul Boileau listened to his wife with the apologetic-dog expression of a man who suspects his wife is a bitch, only he is just not sure. He had to pull himself out of her words, to remind himself he had something to tell, and this was from the stock exchange. He would take Huntly and Ralph Neville into a corner. Ralph especially liked to be in on things. He spent a great deal of his time getting
in
. Consequently he dropped his voice frequently when speaking, whether it was some story of political graft or just the price of eggs.

Oh, dear, said Marion Neville, if only I could remember if it is a violin or a 'cello the wretched little fellow plays, oh, dear, these dagoes have funny eyes. But she would ask him to her house and get him to autograph a celebrity tablecloth.

Huntly's table was smouldering with red roses, the roselight that Theodora remembered now, of Meroë. She swam through the sea of roses towards that other Ithaca. On that side there were the pines, and on this side Moraïtis. His hand begged for mercy, fingering a crumb. And Theodora granted it. They did not speak much.

Except once when his voice swam up, as if remembering, and said, ‘The roses …' turning to her to offer his discovery.

‘We lived once in an old yellowstone house,' she said. ‘Old for here, that is. And one side was a thicket of roses. A tangle. I tell myself I can remember roses reflected on the ceiling, in the early morning, when I was a child. Do you think this can be a fact, or just absurd?'

‘Yes?' he said doubtfully.

But although he did not understand, she knew that there was much that he would. In the eyes of Moraïtis there were many familiar objects. He held things with humility, his glass, or knife. Altogether there was little correspondence between Moraïtis and what was going on now round Huntly Clarkson's table. He stood in the reflected roselight.

At the end of the dinner they brought with the dessert some very expensive crystallized fruits, which were no longer fruit but precious stones, hard, and their sweetness had a glitter. This was the apotheosis of the meal, in which the light brandished swords. You forgot the flat words in the glitter of glass and diamonds, the big crystallized stones that hung from Marion Neville's body, and the angelic straps on Elsa Boileau's brown shoulders. The whole of Huntly Clarkson's life lay there on the table, crystallized, in front of Theodora Goodman, and she knew at such moments that there was nothing more to know.

Theodora, felt Huntly Clarkson, is an upright chair, a Spanish leather, in which an Inquisitor has sat, a shabby rag of skin passing judgement on souls. For a few moments he hated Theodora. The way you can hate something that is untouchable.

But the evening of the dinner for Moraïtis the shallower moments prevailed. The two diamond women took out the ragbag of conversation, their coloured snippets flew. And Paul Boileau watched his wife. He tried to read the answer to his own suspicions in the inclinations of her body, in the intonations of her voice. He looked at the Greek as much as to say: Are you the one who will provide the clue? Because the Greek happened to offer himself at the moment, a concrete object of suspicion.

The Greek suddenly walked, as if he had made up his mind, and sat beside Theodora Goodman.

‘They have put me in a room,' he said, ‘where I cannot practise.'

The words that he suddenly found he took out with precision. He smiled to see.

‘It is all furniture,' he said. ‘I cannot live in such a room. I require naked rooms.'

‘Bare,' said Theodora Goodman.

‘Bare?' said the Greek. ‘Naked is the word for women.'

‘Naked can be the word,' said Theodora.

‘Bare,' smiled Moraïtis, for a fresh discovery. ‘Greece, you see, is a bare country. It is all bones.'

‘Like Meroë,' said Theodora.

‘Please?' said Moraïtis.

‘I too come from a country of bones.'

‘That is good,' said Moraïtis solemnly. ‘It is easier to see.'

He sat forward with his legs apart, his body crouched, his small muscular Greek hands clasped between taut knees. Theodora looked at his thinking hands.

‘You see, I am a peasant,' said Moraïtis. ‘I am very conscious of the shape of the country. I come from the Peloponnese. It is rich, fat, purple country, but underneath you can feel the bones. Many people were killed there. Greeks die often,' he said.

All the time he was thinking with his hands, feeling his way from object to object, and his hands struggled together to contain the mystery of death.

‘Greeks are happiest dying,' smiled Moraïtis. ‘Their memorials do not reflect this fatality. All the Greek monuments suggest a continuity of life. The theatre at Epidauros, you have seen it, and Sounion? Pure life. But the Greeks are born to die.'

‘I have not seen it,' said Theodora. ‘I have seen nothing.'

‘It is not necessary to see things,' said Moraïtis. ‘If you know.'

But now he had left her. He had begun to take some fresh path. He pursued it, upright now, drumming and humming, sometimes looking out this way and that through the thicket of other people's conversation, seeing and surprised.

Marion Neville looked at a little wristwatch set with small diamonds and rubies and said that they must go.

So it was time.

‘Good-bye, Miss Goodman,' said Moraïtis. ‘I shall remember we are compatriots in the country of the bones.'

‘What is all this?' asked Huntly Clarkson.

‘Nothing,' said Theodora. ‘We were indulging in a flight.'

Huntly knew then that the door had closed. This, perhaps, was the extent of his relationship with Theodora Goodman. She closed doors, and he was left standing on his handsome mahogany interior, which was external, fatally external, outside Theodora Goodman's closed door. Huntly Clarkson stood and
wanted to overcome his humiliation, which he could not pay anyone to take.

The dinner for the Greek 'cellist was on the Friday. On the Tuesday there took place the first of the four concerts that Moraïtis would give, and this was variously described as brilliant, as a magnificent tapestry of sound and colour woven by a master hand, and as a feast for all music lovers. So that it was smart to talk about the Moraïtis recitals, and to learn the names of the pieces that he played.

Theodora had not been. She very much doubted whether she would go. Because, in thinking, she had become obsessed with Moraïtis, his words, his hands. It is not necessary to see things, said Moraïtis, if you know. It is like this, she said. And yet, for the pure abstract pleasure of knowing, there was a price paid. She remembered the Man who was Given his Dinner, the moment on the bridge, which was the same pure abstraction of knowing. But the exaltation was cold without the touch of hands, the breathing and stirring and waking of the tree in the snow.

Anyway, Theodora Goodman did not go to any one of the Moraïtis recitals. She waited, rather, to hear that they had passed, and that Moraïtis, whom she would not see, had gone. And like this, they were over. On the walls and hoardings the bills were already covered over by other wonders. She breathed. She felt exhausted, thin, after a long summer. Only Moraïtis did not go. He would remain, the papers wrote, for one more concert, as a guest artist, he would play the Such-and-Such Concerto.

Then, if that is how it is to be, decided Theodora Goodman.

‘Enjoy yourself,' Mrs Goodman said, as if she were half afraid she might.

She remembered as a consolation that Fanny had been the musical one, whereas Theodora had often played an angular music that did not exist. Her thin, dark, struggling arms had filled Mrs Goodman with distaste.

At the concert, as at all concerts, everyone was rounded and well fed. Music filled out the lines and emphasized banality. It is not possible to listen to music without the body becoming
a hump on a chair. Over the hall a great grey dumb organ hung and brooded, as it had over other similarly irrelevant occasions, of civic pomposity, or the paper folly of charity balls. Now an orchestra, playing an overture by a Russian, made the dust dance dimly on the organ's face, stirred the dinners in stomachs on the chairs. Some of the chairs were still empty, the chairs of smarter people, who ate longer, later dinners, and who would arrive only in time for the name of Moraïtis.

Theodora Goodman sat close, but to one side, in such a position that she was an oblique assistant to the strings. But she could not listen much. She heard the slabs of music piled one upon the other. She waited for the heap to be made, till Moraïtis should come. And her bones were sick and brittle, her hands burned. Good-bye, Miss Goodman, Moraïtis had said, I shall remember we are compatriots. Taking it for granted there would be no reunion, but why, unless Moraïtis accepted the distances, in which case there was no need. Now she wondered about him, in the wilderness of preliminary music, where he stood, perhaps in a small brown, bare room with two large gilt mirrors of an unfashionable century, in which he stared at his blue chin, working together his muscular hands. Through the rain of distant music, in a comb of corridors, Moraïtis stood in the perspective of the brown room, which tried to contain him, but which failed, defeating its own purpose in reflections of reflections, endlessly. Just as Moraïtis himself defeated his own inadequate face, overflowing through the cavities, or thought eludes the skeleton of words. Theodora saw the reflection of Moraïtis suddenly pick up a tumbler of water from a tin tray, and all the reflections swallowed. Then the reflections gave a quick glance at their teeth. Each of these solemn acts was repeated by the mirror, and isolated, and magnified, without detracting from its privacy. Because Moraïtis was protected by some detachment of unconcern. He accepted the isolation. He retied his bow. The eyelids were contemptuous on the eyes.

At that moment people had begun to clap, and she knew that he had come. He stepped out on to the stage in the isolation which he had brought with him from the mirrors. His bald head shone like a bone. Moraïtis sat down and put his 'cello between his legs, and now you could see that his isolation fitted him
closely, aptly, like an armour, which would protect in him some moments that were too delicate to expose. Theodora watched. He saw and did not see. Now she was closer. It was no longer a matter of intervening heads and chairs. She was herself the first few harsh notes that he struck out of his instrument against the tuning violins.