The Aunt's Story (16 page)

Theodora felt the warm gusts of the white woman. She felt her eyes. She saw the wet lips that many nights had pulped. Such a glittering progress, that was both lovely and obscene, turned her own skin to bark under her brown clothes.

the woman sang.

Her teeth were gold, and her voice as thick as blotting paper, that you began to read, the yellow writing in reverse. Theodora held the woman's voice before the mirror, and the glass was hung with golden plaits, heavy as harvest on the dining-room carpet. Out of the past Pearl fell.

‘Pearl!' said Theodora. ‘It is surely Pearl!'

‘Pearl?' said the white woman, as if doubting an echo.

She held her head on one side against the screaming of the trams.

‘Yes,' said Theodora, ‘yes. Pearl.'

She came closer to touch the woman's hand, to confirm that what was fat and white had once been cold and red, from washing in the yard.

‘But of course,' said Theodora, ‘even I am forty-five.'

‘If a day,' said the woman coldly.

Because now she suspected a plant, some new game the johns were trying on. Her face hardened to resist.

‘But you have lasted, Pearl,' said Theodora. ‘How beautiful you are still.'

‘I'm no bloody corpse,' the woman said. ‘So they tell me anyways. But who are you, with your Pearl, Pearl?'

Now it was not so much a plant that her voice feared, as somebody trying to open a cupboard of which she had thrown away the key.

‘Come on,' she urged, her white forehead cracking in a black frown. ‘I ain't got all night. I got an appointment with a friend.'

Then her face began to open up. It was as clear as morning. Pearl Brawne stood trembling in the yard.

‘Christ, strike a bloody light! Let us see,' said Pearl. ‘It makes
you feel sick. It makes you feel queer. Theo Goodman, eh?' she said. ‘How about a drop to buck us up? Just one before they close.'

Theodora Goodman went with Pearl Brawne into the public house. It was no longer odd. She followed Pearl beyond the rasping of the frosted glass.

Pearl said two ports. She said it would warm the cockles.

Though the air was already suffocation hot. It swirled grey. At the bar a man with a mulberry nose had a talent for eating glass. He was munching slowly at his tumbler. It did not seem odd, though somebody screamed.

‘Makes you think they was loopy,' Pearl said.

Theodora did not see why.

Because object or motive had achieved a lovely, a logical simplicity. She had found Pearl. She touched the stem of her frail glass. Things were as plain as the notes of a five-finger exercise played in the frost.

‘Well, Theo, tell,' said Pearl, arranging her big white hands in front of her bust.

‘There is nothing to tell,' said Theodora.

‘Go on, Theo,' Pearl said, ‘there is always everything to tell.'

‘I am forty-five,' said Theodora, ‘and very little has happened.'

‘Keep that under your lid, love. It is something to forget,' said Pearl, knitting her hands.

‘I am an aunt,' said Theodora. ‘I suppose there is at least that.'

‘I could have guessed it,' said Pearl.

‘Why?'

‘Now you are asking,' Pearl said.

She laughed. It was not unpleasant. She was kinder than kindness. Theodora's body bloomed under the kind rain of Pearl. She touched her small purple glass. She loved the glasseater's purple nose.

‘Two ports,' Pearl said. ‘No? Well, I shall have another. For me health, dear. Does you good.'

Theodora wondered how the purple world of Pearl, that was so close, eludes other hands. Life is full of alternatives, but no choice.

‘When I went from yous,' said Pearl, ‘I had a little boy. He died.'

‘That was sad, Pearl,' Theodora said.

‘No,' said Pearl, ‘it was not sad.'

She blew a big white funnel of smoke, and it was logical, but not sad.

‘It just happened that way,' said Pearl.

‘And Tom Wilcocks?'

‘Why Tom?'

‘I wondered.'

‘Phhh, I never cared for Tom!'

Her breath emphasized.

‘I had everything I wanted,' Pearl said. ‘I had friends. I had silk gowns and gorgeous lingerie. Nobody hates Pearl. Hey, Dot, give us another port. For the sake of old times.'

Now the port flowed in a powerful purple stream.

‘When I was a kid,' said Pearl, ‘I used to want an alarm clock. I was scared these was somethink I might miss.'

‘Yes,' cried Theodora, ‘I know, I know.'

‘You!' said Pearl. ‘What do you know? Garn,
you
!'

Her mouth tipped. Pearl had descended deeper than the port could reach. Theodora did not suggest that she had perhaps plumbed the same depths. She did not feel capable.

Instead she said in the voice that people were accustomed to accept as hers, ‘You are right, of course. I know very little. Still.'

‘You poor kid,' cried Pearl in her big white blotting-paper voice that craved for moisture. ‘I had a friend who could say off bits of the cyclopaedia. You couldn't ask a question without he knew the answer. You couldn't carry on a conversation. Made me nervous in the end. My bloody word! As bad as your Dad, Cyril was. Remember your Dad, Theo, eh?'

But Theodora would have blocked her ears with wax. She could not bear to face the islands from which Pearl sang. Now her veins ebbed, which had flowed before. Almost overhead hung an almost stationary electric bulb. Pearl saw this too. She huddled. Her white face was streaky grey.

‘Sometimes it winks,' Pearl said. ‘Sometimes it just looks.'

‘Then it is time,' said Theodora. ‘I must leave you.'

‘What did you expect' said Pearl. ‘I got an appointment with a friend. A commercial gentleman from Adelaide.'

Outside the night had ripened. It was big and black. Pearl began to look all ways. Pearl was lost.

But Theodora had the strength of childhood.

‘Good-bye, Pearl,' she said, and she kissed the big white face from which the wind was blowing the powder. ‘Good-bye, Pearl.'

As poignantly and relentlessly as if the cart were waiting in the back yard.

‘So long, dear,' said Pearl.

She began to sway away, glass now, her large flower, but cut glass. She could have broken. Her big white powdered scones moved, but only just, on their stately cut-glass stand.

‘Don't tell me I'm shickered,' she said. ‘Now where'd that bugger say he'd be?'

Then the night gulped, and she was gone.

Theodora Goodman did not tell her mother that she had seen Pearl Brawne, because it was far too secret.

‘Where have you been, Theodora?' Mrs Goodman asked.

‘Walking, Mother.'

‘And whom did you see?'

Mrs Goodman flung her grammar like a stone.

‘I did not see a cat,' said Theodora.

Mrs Goodman looked at her daughter, who giggled before she left the room.

At this point, Theodora sometimes said, I should begin to read Gibbon, or find religion, instead of speaking to myself in my own room. But words, whether written or spoken, were at most frail slat bridges over chasms, and Mrs Goodman had never encouraged religion, as she herself was God. So it will not be by these means, Theodora said, that the great monster Self will be destroyed, and that desirable state achieved, which resembles, one would imagine, nothing more than air or water. She did not doubt that the years would contribute, rubbing and extracting, but never enough. Her body still clanged and rang when the voice struck.

‘Theo-
dor
-a!'

I have not the humility, Theodora said.

But on a morning the colour of zinc old Mrs Goodman died.

Theodora took the paper, pushed under the door by the man in braces, and which began all mornings. Her feet were flat in the hall. There had been a murder at Cremorne, and some vehemence about the throwing of a cricket ball, by one cricketer at another, in a match somewhere. On the top stair, which had frayed, Theodora bent to pull the thread. After many years this patch had gone too far. Theodora pulled, but, bending, began to listen to the silence in the house. It was the silence of silence that her heart began to tell. Her fingers ripped the coarse thread from the stair. Holding her breath for a wrench of hiccups that did not come, she went into the room. She is dead, she said, she has died in her sleep. Old Mrs Goodman had died, of course, without her teeth. Her lips had sunk in on her gums, leaving her with a final expression that was gentle, and prim, and uncharacteristically silly. Theodora folded the hands of death. Her breath fell stubbornly, thicker, faster, into the room. She did not cry. On the contrary, she ran downstairs, so fast that she was afraid her body might hurtle ahead. When she stood on the back steps, she was still not sure what she would do, whether it would be something ridiculous and shameful, or tragic and noble.

‘Mornin', Miss Goodman,' said Mr Love, who was tying an intervening vine on his side of the common fence.

‘Good morning, Mr Love,' said Theodora Goodman.

Mr Love had some kind of pension, and a rupture, and a nephew in New Guinea, and a fawn pug with brown points called Puck.

‘There has been a vile murder in Cremorne,' said Mr Love.

Mr Love was quiet, and he almost always wore sandshoes, so that his sympathy, Theodora knew, would be reverent and rubber-soled.

‘Yes,' she said, ‘I know.'

But she did not know, even now, what next.

She knew that death can destroy, and she had herself died once, at cockrow, in a crumbling of stone and a scattering of ashes. But she could not die again for this old woman who had been her mother, who deserved pity and a few tears, if only for her teeth, suspended in an endless china smile in a glass beside the bed.

Ah, said Theodora, I shall tell Mr Love, and he will know to say the decent and sad-sounding words.

But she hesitated still, with her tongue between her lips. She clenched her hands. She would possess the situation alone, entirely, firmly, a few moments longer. She held her mother in her hand.

‘B
UT
, my darling,' said Theodora Goodman, ‘there is very little to tell.'

She felt the pressure of the child, almost as slight as paper on her side, her breath that was almost her own. Her own arm round the child was a formal gesture of protection, scarcely flesh. Now that they approached the hour of the funeral, Theodora was exhausted, as if she had carried more than the burden of the dead.

‘Will you really go away, Aunt Theo?' asked Lou.

‘Yes,' said Theodora. ‘I shall go away.'

‘Then there will soon be a lot of other stories to tell.'

‘I expect not,' Theodora said.

‘Why?' asked Lou.

‘Because there are the people who do not have many stories to tell.'

There were the people as empty as a filigree ball, though even these would fill at times with a sudden fire.

‘Now you must sit up, Lou,' she said. ‘You are heavy.'

‘I wish …' said Lou.

‘What do you wish?'

‘I wish I was you, Aunt Theo.'

And now Theodora asked why.

‘Because you know things,' said Lou.

‘Such as?'

‘Oh,' she said, ‘things.'

Her eyes were fixed, inwardly, on what she could not yet express.

‘Either there is very little to learn, or else we learn very little,' said Theodora. ‘You will discover that in time.'

‘But perhaps if I live to be very old,' said Lou. ‘Like a tortoise, for instance.'

So that Theodora was forced to agree.

The child shivered for the forgotten box, which she had not seen, but knew.

‘If I do not die,' she said.

Theodora looked down through the distances that separate, even in love. If I could put out my hand, she said, but I cannot. And already the moment, the moments, the disappearing afternoon, had increased the distance that separates. There is no lifeline to other lives. I shall go, said Theodora, I have already gone. The simplicity of what ultimately happens hollowed her out. She was part of a surprising world in which hands, for reasons no longer obvious, had put tables and chairs.

T
HEODORA
Goodman sat in the hall near the reception desk and waited for somebody to come. She had waited she did not know how long, without caring, among the linoleum squares. These were an old yellow-brown. I can wait here very much longer, Theodora said. Labels were plastered on her luggage, but her face was bare. There are the faces that do not belong particularly anywhere and which, for that reason, can rest unquestioned. Theodora looked at her labels, at all those places to which apparently she had been. In all those places, she realized, people were behaving still, opening umbrellas, switching off the light, singing Wagner, kissing, looking out of open windows for something they had not yet discovered, buying a ticket for the metro, eating salted almonds and feeling a thirst. But now that she sat in the hall of the Hôtel du Midi and waited, none of those acts was what one would call relevant, if it ever had been. She touched the old dark ugly furniture that had a dark and lingering smell of olives, the same sombre glare. There is perhaps no more complete a reality than a chair and a table. Still, there will always also be people, Theodora Goodman said, and she continued to wait with something of the superior acceptance of mahogany for fresh acts.

Somewhere among her things, perhaps in the leather writing case she had been obliged to buy on the Ponte Vecchio, Theodora still had the brochure in which the management of the Hôtel du Midi hinted glossily at
luxe
. Now she was glad that things are rarely as described. Reality reduced the Hôtel du Midi from solitary splendour to a tight fit, between a garage and a
confiserie
. The Hôtel du Midi wore vines and a frill or two of iron. There were the blinds that furled and unfurled still, and the blind that evidently had stuck. Smells came in at the door, petrol and oil, fish, sea, and the white negative smell of dust. A clock ticked, prim and slow, a clock with a fat, yellow, familiar face, removed brutally from somebody's house and
exposed to the public hall of a hotel. Somewhere, Theodora remembered, there would also be the
jardin exotique
. She considered its possibility, smiling for her own weakness. It was this, no doubt, that had helped her to decide, why the Hôtel du Midi, and not du Sud, de l'Orient, Belle Vue, or de la Gare, neither Menton, nor Cannes, nor Saint Tropez, but just here. Somewhere at the back, unsuspected, without the assistance of the management's brochure, fantastic forms were aping the gestures of tree and flower. Theodora listened to the silence, to hear it sawn at by the teeth of the
jardin exotique
, but instead feet began to come down the passage.

And a man said, ‘
Je regrette que vous attendiez, Mademoiselle. Il n'y a rien de plus ennuyeux
.'

‘On the contrary,' said Theodora, ‘it is sometimes enjoyable just to sit.'

‘Perhaps,' said the man, ‘but first it is necessary to learn.'

He was not particularly distinguished, but Theodora knew that he would express many just sentiments, putting the apt words in their right order. He would persuade that things exist. He had possibly written the brochure. She confirmed this in time, the author of the brochure was, in fact, Monsieur Durand.

Now he said, ‘I can offer you only a small room.
Modeste, mais tout à fait agréable
. With every
confort moderne
. Mademoiselle must understand that many of our guests stay a long time. Even years. It is many years since General Sokolnikov or Madame Rapallo first came.'

Signing her stiff name in the book, Theodora was grateful for her modest but agreeable room. On the desk there were the picture postcards of the
plage
. There was the big penwiper, a dusty black velvet flower, on which the ink had rusted many years previously, possibly on the arrival of the General. Theodora was afraid that she might meet too soon, before she had washed her hands, on the stairs, for instance, Mrs Rapallo, on whose face she had not yet decided, but it wore a purple bloom.

‘And where is the
jardin exotique
?' she asked.

‘
Ah, vous savez, c'est intéressant, notre jardin exotique
. It is straight through, at the back.'

They smiled in common knowledge.

‘But it will keep,' she said.

She was still dazed from the train. Pink rocks had hurtled through the early morning. She was as exhausted, at sudden moments, as if she had been listening to music, some echo of Moraïtis from his country of the bones.

‘I have all these bags,' she said hopefully, but in doubt, wondering whether, for the Hôtel du Midi, she had brought too little or too much.

‘
Oui. Henriette!
' called Monsieur Durand. ‘
Sais-tu où est le petit?
'

‘
Comme si je savais jamais où est le petit!
' said Henriette.

Taking the bags, because it seemed that in any situation in which
le petit
was involved it was not logical to wait, Henriette shifted with flat feet over the linoleum squares. It was obvious that these had been polished for many years by the feet of Henriette.

‘
Mes valises sont assez lourdes
,' suggested Theodora.

‘
Elles sont lourdes. Ouai
,' said Henriette.

Henriette, who was half deflated, the swollen leather of her face, accepted all things, or almost. What the things were that Henriette did not accept Theodora could not decide, as she began to follow. She followed through the dark smell of olives, deeper into the hotel, where green light fell ponderingly through hanging plants and water ran in some hidden cavern. Henriette moved comfortably enough, unconsciously, neither young nor old. She moved as if the toes of her flat feet were splaying over sand. She moved with the friction of calico and brown skin. Her body smelled of nakedness and sun.

Theodora gasped behind the fine ease of nakedness, the superior agility of her porteress in climbing a sudden escarpment of stairs. She looked for now, but did not find, her bags poised on the head of Henriette. I must remember the lay of the land, said Theodora, crossing a small ridge of steps, though without compass she did not expect to accomplish much.

‘
Nous voilà
,' said Henriette.

She kicked open with her foot the small but agreeable room, in which
confort moderne
glared from a corner, but dog-eyed from weeping taps.

‘
C'est pas mal
,' said Henriette. ‘But you cannot bell.
Voyez
? It is broke.'

‘Thank you,' said Theodora. ‘I am fairly independent.'

She stood holding her practical handbag, which was a travelling present from Fanny, and which had compartments for extraordinary things. Now she held it as if she had just found it, and looked to see what her embarrassment would discover. Somewhere a man's voice, singing a tango, was brick-warm, supple as a cat.

‘
Merci
,' said Henriette.

But she listened, distantly, to the singing voice. Henriette's leather face, which would never admit much of what was sewn inside, swallowed a trace of bitterness. Still listening to the voice, she scratched her left armpit and went.

Perhaps it is the implication of the tango, decided Theodora, which Henriette does not accept.

She began to turn in her small room. Maroon roses, the symbols of roses, shouted through megaphones at the brass bed. Remembering the flesh of roses, the roselight snoozing in the veins, she regretted the age of symbols, she regretted the yellow object beside the bed which served the purpose of a chair. She could not love the chair, or rather, she could not love it yet.

Still with a hope for the future of her small room, she continued to turn in it. She snapped the fasteners on her luggage and took out objects of her own, to give the room her identity and justify her large talk of independence to Henriette. She put a darning egg, and a pincushion, and the Pocket Oxford Dictionary. Her damp and melancholy sponge, grey from the journey, was hung in a draught to dry. All these acts, combined, gave to her some feeling of permanence. And she put on her bedside table the leather writing case which she had been obliged to buy on the Ponte Vecchio, and in which, she supposed, she would write letters to relations. Lying on her back, in the dark, in sleeping cars, and the bedrooms of reasonable hotels, she had recalled the features of relations. These did give some indication of continuity, of being. But even though more voluble, they were hardly more explanatory than the darning egg or moist sponge with which she invested each new room.

Now in this one, more formidable because it was the latest, her hopes were faint. Encouraged by the thought of the garden, she could not escape too soon from the closed room, retreating
from the jaws of roses, avoiding the brown door, of which the brass teeth bristled to consume the last shreds of personality, when already she was stripped enough. She would go down, at once, hoping her anxiety would not be noticed in the passage, or her sweeping skirt heard. But there were no faces. Only, in the concealed cavern, water could still be heard falling, and the damp hair of ferns trailing from wicker baskets touched her cheeks.

‘
Vous cherchez notre jardin exotique
. It is straight through and at the back,' said Monsieur Durand again.

She suspected he had been waiting to repeat just this information, but his smile was blameless as water.

‘In the warm evenings,' Monsieur Durand said, and smiled, ‘the ladies sometimes take their coffee in the garden. It is agreeable. Our climate is so mild.'

The thin voice of Monsieur Durand hesitated, withdrew, over the pebbles his boots, but the voice still politely dusted down the little once-green iron chairs for the skirts of ladies anxious about the dust or dew.

Theodora Goodman went on. Holding back the sun with her hands as she stepped out, she hoped that the garden would be the goal of a journey. There had been many goals, all of them deceptive. In Paris the metal hats just failed to tinkle. The great soprano in Dresden sang up her soul for love into a wooden cup. In England the beige women, stalking through the rain with long feet and dogs, had the monstrous eye of sewing machines. Throughout the gothic shell of Europe, in which there had never been such a buying and selling, of semiprecious aspirations, bulls' blood, and stuffed doves, the stone arches cracked, the aching wilderness, in which the ghosts of Homer and St Paul and Tolstoy waited for the crash.

Theodora crunched across the sharp gravel, towards a bench, to sit. The air of the
jardin exotique
was very pure and still. Shadows lay with a greater hush across its stones, as if the abstracted forms to which the shadows were attached could only be equalled by silences. The garden was completely static, rigid, the equation of a garden. Slugs linked its symbols with ribbons of silver, their timid life carefully avoiding its spines.

Notre jardin exotique
, Monsieur Durand had said, but his
pronoun possessed only diffidently. It was obvious enough now, Theodora knew. This was a world in which there was no question of possession. In its own right it possessed, and rejected, absorbing just so much dew with its pink and yellow mouths, coldly tearing at cloth or drawing blood. The garden was untouchable. In the white sunlight that endured the cactus leaves, Theodora looked at her finger, at the single crimson pinhead of her own blood, which was in the present circumstances as falsely real as a papier mâché joke.

Walking slowly, in her large and unfashionable hat, she began to be afraid she had returned to where she had begun, the paths of the garden were the same labyrinth, the cactus limbs the same aching stone. Only in the
jardin exotique
, because silence had been intensified, and extraneous objects considerably reduced, thoughts would fall more loudly, and the soul, left with little to hide behind, must forsake its queer opaque manner of life and come out into the open.

If, of course, the soul ventured in. Theodora found her bench. She sat beneath a crimson-elbowed thorn. Her hands lay empty in her lap, but waiting to touch. Somewhere there would be people, she knew, reassured by a clatter of forks that came from the rear of the comfortable hotel. So she waited, and watched, and listened to the forks, that must be clattering for lunch.

Through the vines and the window the boy in the tight trousers, who just failed to pirouette, sailed on the smile of his own reflection, contemptuously dropping electroplate on to the little separate chequered tables. Theodora knew that she would fear the tight boy, and that she would be included in the contempt he felt for cutlery. She dreaded her island in the dining room, and the great oceans of dinner and lunch. She never survived the judgement of hotels, because she was not made of scorn. But, in the meantime, the boy sang. He sang like any tango, and his voice smelled of
caporal bleu
. He was smoothed down. She could feel his dark vanity soothed, smoothed at last, to the consistency of discs, as the words of his tango, its
rêves
and
fièvres
, dulled the sound of forks.

Behind the vines, pipes, and plaster patches, under the pressure of its inner life, the rear of the comfortable hotel began to
expand. It reassured, like the breathing of eiderdowns in childhood, or the touch of hands. But it was only just tolerated by the sceptical, dry, chemical air of the
jardin exotique
in which Theodora sat. From the garden the hotel was making the best of things. Theodora had the uncomfortable impression that this is all one can expect.

But all the time, inside the hotel, there were the signs of shabby hopefulness, the rushing of water, spit of fat, a square woman at a window who dropped a ball of hair from her comb, the listening face of Henriette. The tight boy, thinking he was unseen, smiled through the vines at a patch of sunlight. For the moment he could ignore the exigencies of love and hate, vanity and self-pity. Even though she had not yet seen them, Theodora could feel that the hotel was full of people, and she waited to touch their hands.