The Aunt's Story (17 page)

A slight breeze began to play with the cactus fingers. They creaked. The pads of the prickly pear moved in the air as dignified as blotting paper. Age and wisdom, intensified to a point that was unwise, rustled their eyelids, and looked.

But the girl who now ran into the garden, out of the hotel, the girl was young. Unlike General Sokolnikov and Madame Rapallo, who had settled in years ago, the girl had not yet remained anywhere very long.

‘I am tired,' she said. ‘I am tired of all this. I shall write and tell them I must go away.'

Her white light fell among the cactus roots that she did not see. You did not feel the girl had ever paused long to consider the
jardin exotique
. It was something described by a brochure to entice old women with embroidery.

‘This is no way to be'ave,' said the square woman who had thrown her dead hair from the window, and who now followed the girl out. ‘To grumble at your Mummy and Dad, who do what they do for the best, and you know they do.'

‘Motives are difficult to understand, without faces,' said the girl. ‘It is so long since I saw them.'

‘That is ungrateful, Katina,' said the square woman, sucking her plate.

‘But it is true. Truth is often ungrateful.'

The girl spoke to herself, the words she had saved so long
they were heavy and swollen. Her lips were thoughtful with bitterness and sun. Her hair had been set in a shop. It was very beautiful, and black, but not right. It continued to contradict the authority of fashion, for it is not possible to tie up a bundle of black snakes and then contain their seething. So the girl's hair escaped. She was white and black. Her skin had the bluish undertones of snow and marble. She had run out of the hotel, and Theodora thought of doves, the warm white flight from the cot into the sun. She thought of the one she had held in her hands, both frail and throbbing with impulsion, waiting to burst skywards on release.

‘You do not realize, Grigg dear,' said the girl. ‘I must go home.'

Her voice died. Each moment of waiting was a death. And Theodora Goodman had become a mirror, held to the girl's experience. Their eyes were interchangeable, like two distant, unrelated lives mingling for a moment in sleep.

Th square woman pawed the ground.

‘Your parents will take you,' she said, ‘when they think fit.'

‘Where?' asked the girl. ‘To the next hotel? To suffocate amongst ash trays. To play at islands in a billiard room.'

‘And what is wrong with ‘otels?' the square woman said. ‘Provided there is hot and cold.'

‘I must go home,' said the girl. ‘Before I have quite forgotten. There was an earthquake, do you remember? And we ran and lay on the beach. There was a black island that shook.'

Theodora trembled for the black island. She looked across at the opposite shore, which was just there, in the sea glaze. The earth was a capsule waiting for some gigantic event to swallow it down. Theodora looked at the island and waited for it to move.

‘Miss Theodora,' said Katina, or her small extinct voice, ‘I think that the wind has died.'

‘Yes,' said Theodora, ‘it is most surely dead.'

In fact, it hung, a dead thing, from the twigs of the ragged pine. People came and went, their shrunk faces, their bare feet. Something would happen, they said, but not yet.

‘“Then it was that Lord Byron, with a gesture of great
gallantry, put at the disposition of the desperate Greeks his fortune and his life,”' Katina read.

Walls yawned, the walls of the chapel against which the pine stood, and rubbed, not now, but when there was a wind. Now the walls yawned, in anticipation of the event.

‘I think we shall not read any more. Dear Miss Theodora, would you mind?' Katina said. ‘I would like better to have a talk. About life and things.'

Miss Theodora looked at Katina. She could not often mind, because with Katina, her subtle sleek touch, it was like that. Touching the cheek, Katina melted bones.

‘Normally I should mind,' Miss Theodora said. ‘But now it it quite definitely far too hot.'

‘Dear Miss Theodora, you always find reasons.'

‘I am a kind of governess,' Theodora said.

‘I would like you,' said Katina, ‘to be a kind of aunt. Then we would still come to islands, but without books. We would sit without our dresses, and eat
pistaches
, and do nothing, and talk. And I would kiss you, like this, in the particular way I have for aunts.'

‘Go, Katina! It is far too hot.'

‘It is never too hot for kissing. And your skin smells nice.'

In the sun, Katina herself was a small round white flint. That I could pick up and fling, wrapped in my love, Theodora felt, into the deathless, breathless sea.

But instead she said dryly, ‘Sometimes, my dear, you say odd things. At least for a little girl.'

‘Why odd?' Katina said. ‘And why am I always a little girl?'

Exactly, Theodora supposed. She knew they were both of them undeceived. Their shadows mingled in the sand and stones, held hands, waiting for some cataclysm of earth and sea.

When it was dark, and this night in particular, outside the room which had been taken for them in advance, voices just hung in the air, singing of brigands and sudden death.

‘Talk to me, Miss Theodora,' the child said. ‘The air has stopped. I cannot sleep.'

The air certainly did not advance, and was brittle as guitars.

‘Ah,' yawned Theodora, ‘it will be morning in time. Then we shall talk'

But they were not convinced.

‘Perhaps it will not,' Katina said.

They lay and listened for noises in the walls.

‘Miss Theodora, are you sleeping?' asked the child.

‘No,' Theodora sighed. ‘Why?'

‘If we are ever to die,' Katina said, ‘I think it will be an island, in which there are many pines, and we shall make a long picnic in a little cart, to the Temple of Athena, and the water will be cold, cold, amongst the stones.'

Ohhh the long night rolled but studded with islands. Then the sudden door-knob stood in the pale morning. Still for a moment. But you knew it was not for long. It would happen soon. Now.

The morning light saw the drawers fly out of the chest. Its tongues lolled. The whole cardboard house rejected reason. Then there was a running. They were calling on the stairs, Yanni the Moustache, and his daughter Science.

‘Come,' they called. ‘Run. It is the will of God. The earth is going to split open and swallow the houses of the poor.'

Whether the implication of this was moral or economic, Theodora did not discover. Hairpins scattered. There was no time.

‘Miss Theodora, what is it. Is it necessary for us to die?'

‘No,' said Theodora. ‘But there is a serious earthquake. They are telling us to leave the houses. We shall lie on the beach.'

In her arms the child's body, still limp with sleep, was like her own nakedness. Their hearts beat openly and together, in the astonished morning, in which people ran, over the dust, on naked feet. Aie, aie, Science the daughter of Yanni cried, her face quite featureless beneath her skirt. They were thrown out, all of them, out of the functionless houses on to the little strip of sand. Their bodies lay on the live earth. They could feel its heart move against their own.

Theodora held the body of the child. She felt the moment of death and life. Across the water a black island moved, quite distinctly, under a chalky puff of cloud.

‘There was an earthquake,' the girl said. ‘Do you remember?'

In the
jardin exotique
a wind was creaking through the fingers of the cactus. Their elbows groaned.

‘Do I, indeed!' the square woman said. ‘It was an 'eavy responsibility for yours truly. Thank 'eavens your parents 'ave better sense than to make their 'ome in a country that is all quakes. Besides, the people are 'airy and uncivilized. Though there are exceptions in this case as any other.'

‘I shall die,' cried the girl, holding her head.

And you could see it was a matter of life and death.

‘People don't die of affectations,' said the square woman.

People lay on the ground, and heard the shuddering of the earth, and hoped. When the horizon had once more tightened its wire, and it was no longer a matter of life and death, it was difficult to say where one began and the other ended. We like to imagine doors that we can shut, because we are afraid of space, decided Theodora, who lay with her arm protecting the child, with whom she had just experienced the moment of death. Over the opposite island the same small cloud was as ordinary and unmoved, as simple and touching, as a handkerchief.

‘Anyway,' said the square woman, grating on the gravel, ‘let us go in and 'ave an early lunch. It's always nicer, an early lunch.'

‘Look,' said Theodora to the girl, ‘you have dropped your handkerchief.'

She bent and touched the body of the cloud.

‘Thank you,' said the girl, who had just returned, her eyes almost asked the time.

‘Thank you,' said the square woman too. ‘She's always losing 'andkerchiefs. Now, come along, Katina, before the General gets at the sardines.'

So they were going in over the gravel, into the hotel, the square woman and the upright, contemplative body of the girl, who questioned Theodora in silence as she went.

To Theodora, who continued to sit in the garden, where black flies collected on the crimson flowers that the limbs of the cactus oozed, the air was no longer altogether dry and hostile. It stroked her. It said: See, we offer this dispensation, endless, more seductive than aspirin, to give an illusion of fleshy nearness and comfort, in what should be apart, armed, twisted, dreamless, admitting at most the echoes of sound, the gothic world.

Theodora unfolded her hands, which had never known exactly what to do, and least of all now. Her hands, she often felt, belonged by accident, though what, of course, does not. She looked at them, noticing their strangeness, and their wandering, ingrained, grimy, gipsy fate, which was the strangest accident of all.

‘You have just come from the train.'

‘Yes,' said Theodora.

She answered almost without turning to discover whose voice had taken possession of her situation. It was a comfortable statement that it pleased her to accept. Then the woman stood beside her, bending, or rather sagging, to examine through her pince-nez, till you noticed the yellow pores in her large nose.

‘I can see it in your hands.'

‘I know, and I should wash them,' Theodora said.

‘Don't bother,' said the pince-nez. ‘It will work in.'

The voice sighed. You felt it would never willingly pass judgement, though the glasses might accuse.

‘My name is Bloch,' said the pince-nez. ‘And this is my sister Berthe. It is not necessary for me to explain that we are twins.'

It was not. You saw, now, the one was two. But in reverse. It was obvious, subtract one from two and the answer would be nought.

‘Like most people, Marthe, she is perplexed,' remarked Mademoiselle Berthe with pleasure. ‘The likeness, Miss Goodman - we looked in the book and found your name - the likeness is so striking, we have often, we regret to say, made it the occasion for practical jokes.'

The Demoiselles Bloch giggled, for many past crackers let off under the visitor's chair. But Theodora was less perplexed than thoughtful. In this landscape a familiar rain descended, on to the palms and crossword puzzles. Somewhere in the interior, springs groaned for Sunday afternoon.

‘We have been walking,' explained Mademoiselle Marthe, who knew from experience in many hotels that the new or timid guest must be warmed with words. ‘In the mornings it is safe, if not always in the afternoons. This part of the coast, you will find, is subject to alarming climatic changes. But in the morning,
l'air est doux
. So we put on our boots, and took our work. On
the coast road there is a small round tower which has some connection with Napoleon, though we forget what.'

‘It is agreeable to sit there, in the scenery,' said Mademoiselle Berthe, ‘and talk about things that happened while the world was still comparatively safe to live in.'

It was a leisurely but melancholy ping-pong that the Demoiselles Bloch had begun to play.

‘They say, you know, that Hitler will make a war.'

‘Or the Communists will take over.'

‘Or perhaps we shall be subjected to both events.'

Doubt continued to express itself. For the Demoiselles Bloch there was much doubt beyond the bounds of their duplicated self. Their consolation lay in worrying wool and cotton into deeper tangles. String reticules, safety-pinned about the level of the navel, spilled trailers of crochetwork or tatting. Under their flat hats cotton repeated itself in thick skeins, wound, and wound, and wound.

‘Today we are sad,' said Mademoiselle Marthe. ‘I have lost a little stylo, presented to me by the President of the Republic the season we spent in a hotel at Vichy. Sometimes at five o'clock we used to discuss language and food under a potted palm, while eating cucumber sandwiches. So you will understand.'

‘Quite often,' said Theodora, ‘arm-chairs will disgorge a great variety of objects.'

‘We had not thought of that, Marthe,' said Mademoiselle Berthe.

‘No,' said Mademoiselle Marthe. ‘We shall try. It was an amiable little stylo, though it did not fill. I kept it, of course, for sentimental reasons, and because without possessions one ceases to exist.'

‘That,' sighed Mademoiselle Berthe, ‘is the terrible, the terrifying possibility.'

‘We think,' said Mademoiselle Marthe, ‘we ought to tell you we are Jewish.'

The Demoiselles Bloch offered this fact as if it were breakable. They tiptoed tenderly in button boots.

‘It is perplexing,' said Mademoiselle Berthe. ‘When we were younger we were told to fear the Communists. Now we have learnt it is the Fascists. What are you?'