The Aunt's Story (15 page)

But Huntly turned to Theodora and said, ‘You must tell me if you are tired or bored.'

And at once he had lost some of his strength that deference gave him, and the stud bulls.

‘You must not bother about me,' she said.

‘But I do,' he said. ‘You know.'

And at once the presence of the others was a pressure.

‘There is no reason why I should be anything but happy,' said Theodora.

‘Really?' he said, trying to be pleased.

But Theodora was happy. The glare had half closed her eyes. She wandered half alone in the tune her sun-thinned lips hummed, in the smell of the crowd, and the bellowing of bulls. There are times when the crowd and the sun make the individual solitude stronger and less assailable than bronze.

Soon after this Ralph Neville discovered the little shooting gallery, presided over by the female clownface, where the clay ducks jerked on the leather stream, and the kewpies and the chocolates gathered flies. Ralph Neville began to jingle the coins in his pocket, and to gather his audience excitedly, for what febrile exhibition he could not quite suggest, but it had to take place, some primitive, dimly apprehended tail-spreading by the red cock.

‘Come on, Paul, Huntly,' Ralph called.

His neck was bursting in his collar, rich red. His hands gathered them in, and his eyes, watery blue from many bars.

The clowness yawned, preening, out of her white cloud, saying it was sixpence a pot, and high-class prizes for the winners, kewpie dolls for the ladies, wristlet watches, and boxes of lovely chocs.

Huntly, Paul, and Ralph took the little toy rifles to shoot at the jerking clay ducks, jerking on their leather stream to bob
behind a painted waterfall. But Elsa and Marion were bored. They stroked their expensive clothes. With their beautiful-smelling useless fingers they smoothed their pasted lips. And all the time the emotional, hysterical, canvas-tearing voice of the little toy rifles as the men missed the clay ducks.

‘You men wouldn't earn your living as cowboys,' Marion said.

The clowness dusted a kewpie. She was a cloud, but fleshy, big, white, smelling of warm flesh and the hot flinty barrels of the rifles she handed back.

‘Ladies care to try their luck?' the clowness asked. ‘Come on, girls, show the gents how.'

‘No,
thank
you!' Elsa laughed. Now she had begun to be annoyed. She bit her purple upper lip.

‘I shall try,' Theodora said.

‘Have you been hiding your talents, Theodora?' Marion asked.

But Theodora took the rifle, closing her eyes to the glare. She stood already in the canvas landscape against which the ducks jerked, her canvas arms animated by some emotion that was scarcely hers. Because the canvas moments will come to life of their own accord, whether it is watching the water flow beneath a bridge, or listening to hands strike music out of wood. The Man who was Given his Dinner, and Moraïtis, for some, had already shown her this. Now she stood in the smell of flint and powdered flesh, from which the world of Huntly Clarkson had receded, and she took aim at the clay heads of the jerking ducks. She took aim, and the dead, white, discarded moment fell shattered, the duck bobbed headless.

‘Good for Theodora,' Ralph said.

They all gathered, watched, spoke, but they were speaking now at a door that had closed tight, leaving them embarrassed and surprised. They did not know what any of this might signify. They watched the clay ducks shatter each time Theodora fired, and it was as if each time a secret life was shattered, of which they had not been aware, and probably never would have, but they resented the possibility removed. It was something mysterious, shameful, and grotesque. What can we say now? they felt.

‘The lady appears to be a crack shot,' the clowness said. ‘Care for a kewpie, dear? Or chocs?'

But Theodora did not hear. Huntly Clarkson's face was smiling, but grey.

‘Let us go on somewhere else,' Theodora said.

They walked over the grass that feet had trampled dead green. At Meroë also, she remembered, the grass was dead, whether among the tussocks on the flat or along the flanks of the black volcanic hills; and she remembered, too, the swift moment of the hawk, when her eye had not quivered. It is curious, she felt, and now, that my flesh does not flap. She was quite distinct. She was as taut as leather, or even bronze. And somewhere behind, the others trailed in uneasy silences of best clothes. Huntly, who walked almost beside her, had become big and soft, with a band of sweat beginning to show through the broad band round his smart grey hat. An abject and sorry deference had begun to make Huntly soft. He was all acceptance, like a big grey emasculated cat, waiting to accept the saucer of milk that would or would not be given. Only Huntly had begun to know that it would not. In the circumstances, or any way at the moment, you could not say that he was sad, because it had to be like this, from the beginning. Behind them the others walked, half knowing, in their silence, ever since Theodora had shot the clay heads off the ducks, that she was separated from them for ever by something that their smooth minds would not grope towards, preferring sofas to a hard bench.

Only some way farther on Huntly turned to Theodora and said, ‘You realize we forgot to collect your prize?'

She looked at him and regretted his smile. It was like the last smile of someone on a railway platform, to whom one should have spoken while there was still time.

‘Yes,' she said, ‘I realized.'

So they walked on, and later in the evening they went out of the gates.

‘Did you enjoy yourself?' asked Mrs Goodman, half in fear.

‘Yes,' said Theodora. ‘I had a mild success at a shooting range.'

Mrs Goodman turned her face, as if she were hiding a scar,
and her breath some quick stab. She hated her daughter painfully. She hated her feet, which had always seemed to move over the earth without touching, and the ridiculous rifle she had carried, which still blackened her brown hands.

‘In front of all those people?' Mrs Goodman said.

‘Why ever not? They applauded me,' said Theodora dryly. ‘I won a kewpie in a feather skirt.'

Mrs Goodman stared at one of her rings that she had never seen before.

‘You must have looked a sight,' said Mrs Goodman, ‘carrying a vulgar doll through the crowd.'

In her hate she would have hewn down this great wooden idol with the grotesque doll in its arms.

‘I spared your sensibility,' Theodora said. ‘I did not take my prize.'

‘I cannot believe that I played even an indirect part in the incident,' said Mrs Goodman.

‘Mother, must you destroy?'

‘Destroy?' asked Mrs Goodman.

‘Yes,' said Theodora. ‘I believe you were born with an axe in your hand.'

‘I do not understand what you mean. Axes? I have sat here all the afternoon. I am suffering from heartburn.'

At night Theodora Goodman would bring her mother cups of hot milk, which she drank with little soft complaining noises, and the milk skin hung from her lower lip. She was old and soft. Then it is I, said Theodora, I have a core of evil in me that is altogether hateful. But she could not overcome her repugnance for the skin that swung from her mother's lip, giving her the appearance of an old white goat.

Mrs Goodman rumbled and sighed. ‘Give me my slippers. Give me my glasses, Theodora. It is time I took my drops. It is cold. It is hot. I am an old woman, and nobody understands the tragedy of age, unless they have experienced it themselves. You, Theodora, will experience a double hell, because you have rejected life.'

‘Go to sleep, Mother,' Theodora would say.

‘Sleep! How can I sleep?'

Horses clattered through the grey light.

‘Why won't you take him?' Mrs Goodman said.

‘Why must I take, take? It is not possible to possess things with one's hands.'

‘I remember the other evening he rode across the bridge. Well,' said Mrs Goodman, ‘Fanny has been happy. It was different when one waited for the sound of horses' feet.'

Horses clattered through the grey world that was Mrs Goodman's sleep, and the morning when Theodora, for some inexorable reason, had got up and gone to look at her mother. Theodora breathed low. Her hair hung over her mother's bed, just not sweeping the face. Neither the softening of sleep nor the callous demolition of age could conceal Mrs Goodman's hatefulness. If there had been only the old soft body, Theodora could have pitied, as if it had been some discarded object in white kid. But she did not pity. At times she could still love, because her mother sat at the end of the passage of roselight, upright on her scroll-back sofa, reading from mahogany lips the little hard poems of Hérédia, which she let fall like pebbles from the past, and the roselight closed and opened. Faces swam at Mrs Goodman's will, the drowning faces of the lost or dead, Father, and Gertie Stepper, and the Syrian, and Pearl Brawne. You see all these faces that I command, said Mother, it is they who give me my significance, they are why I can smile, and you will answer it with love.

It was like this, to Theodora, watching her mother's face in the grey light of morning, through which cold hoofs clattered, and the milkman's bucket. But she could also hate. Love and hate, felt Theodora, are alternate breaths falling from the same breast. And now her own breath was choking and knotting inside her.

If I were to open my mouth, she said, as wide as it will go, and scream from the bottom of my stomach to the top of my voice. Aaahhhhhhhhhhh!

But she did not do it. She trembled for the idea.

She began to walk about the house to avoid her thoughts, but it is not possible to avoid thought, it will not be cut.

She went into the kitchen. Outside there was a wind sawing and rasping, a thin gritty wind of morning, blowing off con
crete and damp brick. The light was so thin in the kitchen that it was not quite moonlight, not quite morning. It glittered on the zinc. The skins of the onion rustled.

Theodora took up the thin knife, very thin and impervious, from where it lay in the zinc light. Now she remembered most distinctly the last counsel Jack Frost had held with the meat-knife in the kitchen. She remembered him standing by the dresser. She could see the black hairs on his wrist as he weighed the pros instead of biscuits.

But this, she trembled, does not cut the knot. She threw back the thin knife, which fell and clattered on the zinc, where it had been put originally to be washed. There was the cup too, which the knife nosed, the empty cup which Mrs Goodman held to her chin and its trembling beard of white skin.

It has been close, felt Theodora, I have put out my hand and almost touched death. She could see its eyelashes, pale as a goat's, and the tongue clapping like a bell.

Bells rang across the bay for morning. Theodora Goodman went upstairs. She paused on the landing, halted by the wave of her mother's unarrested sleep. Light slashed the face of Theodora Goodman to the bone. I am guilty of a murder that has not been done, she said, it is the same thing, blood is only an accompaniment. She went on to her own room, away from the act she had not committed, while her mother continued to sleep.

‘Theodora, you look as if you have seen a murder,' said Mrs Goodman when she woke.

‘I did not sleep, Mother. I shall take an aspirin.'

‘Ah, where would we be without aspirin!' Mrs Goodman said.

When we have drained the last emotional drops from a relationship, we contemplate the cup, which is all that is left, and the shape of that is dubious. So neither Mrs Goodman nor Huntly Clarkson had survived in more than shape.

‘I seldom see you now, Theodora,' Huntly said.

‘If I had anything further to give you, then you would see me,' said Theodora. ‘But we have both survived a phase.'

‘Surely you are making your necessity mine?'

By this time he was able to laugh.

‘Let us call the necessity a common one,' she said.

Though her defence of it was firm, and even brutal, she had not yet discovered what this necessity was. Her days were endless. But at least I am an aunt, said Theodora, when her hands trembled in the grey light, waiting for bells. It had both a close and a distant sound like the letter from Lou:

‘If you would like to go, Theodora,' Mrs Goodman said, ‘there is no reason why you should not. I have the utmost faith in Dr Gilsom, and I can always call in Connie Ewart if anything should happen.'

So the relationship between Lou Parrott and Theodora Goodman remained both close and distant. Paper, from long holding, becomes warm in the hand. This way Theodora was warmed. She carried the letter from Lou, she carried it even in the street, secretly, in her glove.

In the streets in which Theodora walked at dusk the sky was restless. Its fever fluctuated. The violet welts and crimson wounds showed. The trams gushed sparks. All along the streets the hour was fusing even the fragments of unrelated lives, almost of Theodora Goodman. The faces clotting at corners were not so very obscure in this light. The veins were throbbing with the same purple. It was about this time that Theodora noticed the big white flower, glittering and quivering with pollen, grow
slowly from the pavement, sway and bend, offering its thick arum skin.