The Aunt's Story (20 page)

‘
Madame ne mangera pas de marrons glacés?
' grinned
le petit
.

‘
Oh
,
ça
,
c'est dégoûtant
,' said Mrs Rapallo, shaking the dust from a paper frill. ‘And besides,
tu sais que je ne mange presque rien. Jamais
. It is dangerous,' she said meditatively.

She looked in the mirror at her own face, the crystallized mauve and crimson, from which time might soon take the final bite.

‘But you have your nautilus,' said the girl, whom everybody had forgotten, because she was young.

‘Yes, Katina Pavlou, there is always that,' said Mrs Rapallo. ‘My lovely shell. But it is very fragile. I am afraid.'

She went now, but without music. There was an opening and a shutting, an opening and a shutting. Then they were all going. Theodora heard. She could hear their skirts. There was a sound of dust.

One was a stranger then, standing in the fragments of walnut shells, which
le petit
, stripping himself of his white apron, would not bother to sweep up. Already, like the others, he was
taking out from behind his ear, together with the cigarette, a new and still more secret life.

‘
Vous ne sortez pas, Mademoiselle?
'
le petit
said.

‘Where?' asked Theodora.

‘
Il y a tou jours le jardin
,' said
le petit
.

There was. She had forgotten. Possessed by the dusty wax figures, the ritual of biography, Theodora had turned her back. Now she saw it was, in fact, the garden that prevailed, its forms had swelled and multiplied, its dry, paper hands were pressed against the windows of the
salle à manger
, perhaps it had already started to digest the body of the somnolent hotel. There is something to be done, but what, she said. She began to walk across the carpet through the walnut shells and the extinct smiles. Upstairs they had gone to sleep, unconcerned by the growth of the garden. Because it is something that happens and happens, sighed the
bouchées à la reine
. Theodora went outside into the dry, tolerant, motionless, complacent air of the
jardin exotique
. She would in time begin to accept. In the absence of miracles she would worship the stone obelisks with other Europeans. Now also the gravel told her that her shoes needed mending. She would have to ask Monsieur Durand to recommend a
cordonnier
who was both reliable and cheap.

S
EVERAL
times during the afternoon, as the shadows coldly consumed, and the Demoiselles Bloch debated from a window whether woollen shawls would be wiser, Theodora heard the young man whose face when seen full on was a 'cello, walking about the garden, walking and calling a name.

‘Lieselotte! Lieselotte!' his voice called.

His shoulders were thin, grey, scarcely more than cloth amongst the fuller, fleshier forms of the garden. Theodora remembered a man whose braces hung down, a man in a window in Pimlico. She had looked down unseen out of her own superior isolation, into the unsuspecting soul of a thin, kneeling man, whose braces hung, swung, in time with his meek prayer, as he prayed and picked his nose. So she had watched the machinery of desperation function desperately. And now the young man, the 'cello or the scooped bone, swung with this same pendulum, calling the obsessive name.

‘She has not come yet,' Theodora said.

‘How should you know?'

‘I know that nobody likely has come,' said Theodora.

‘Sometimes she is hideous,' said the young man.

He spoke with an air of having worked this out accurately. He broke off an ear of iceplant, and watched it bleed. But to Theodora the act of destruction was not complete. She still heard the name, to which his voice had given small, quivering, distinct beauty, like a sudden snowdrop, green-veined.

‘I suppose I should introduce myself,' said the young man. ‘My name is quite ordinary. It is Wetherby. I am from Birmingham, where my widowed mother still lives in a brick house. My father needless to say, was a clergyman. He was a shy, dry man, to whom I never found anything to say. We were happiest when we could close the separating door. But my mother, she is a different matter. She invariably wears blue. At the minor public school to which I was sent, I used to apologize for her
protruding teeth. To deny her beauty was exquisite. I used to lie in bed at night and think up methods of torture, and cry as I anticipated their effect on her unsuspecting blue.'

On the trunk of a cactus, flies had discovered a wound. Theodora watched their black invasion of the cactus sore.

‘I do hope you won't mind my telling you all this,' said Wetherby. ‘It does me good.'

‘For a long time now,' smiled Theodora, ‘I have been an ointment. I was also an aunt once.'

Her blue hands fingered fairy-tales in braille. She tiptoed in switching off the light.

‘I was a schoolmaster,' said Wetherby. ‘For a while.'

‘And a poet,' said Theodora.

‘Yeees.'

In the garden the silence swung backwards and forwards waiting for the moment to strike. When it does, felt Theodora, either he will be destroyed, or perhaps he will stand there whole.

‘Yes. A poet,' he said. ‘The label was originally stuck on by a Mrs Leese-Leese. She had a country house in Suffolk, and her voice had died. But her suggestive powers were immense. Sitting in her oval drawing room, surrounded by her good taste, she persuaded many of us that we were poets, painters, actors. In this way she hoped she would create her own posterity, although she might ruin us for anything else. Oh, she was very subtle. I can smell her now, the gusts of eau-de-Cologne. Her garden was full of obscure walks, unexpected statuary, and brown leaves. Walking with us, slowly, because she had a hump, or again in the oval drawing-room, she encouraged us to talk on significant subjects, to discuss ourselves, and God. But more particularly ourselves, because in creating our ego by her own will, God became a minor influence, the power was hers. If one rejected her invitations, she wrote letters. These scented out one's vanity. They stroked it from a distance. Even in what one thought was the security of one's own room, with its ugly, haphazard furniture, one was never altogether safe from Muriel Leese-Leese.

Listening to the history of Wetherby, unfolding as logically as a shadow from the root of a cactus, Theodora was not aware that it was meant for her. Rather, she was some haphazard cupboard in his comparatively secure, ugly room, in which he
proposed to arrange his thoughts. In the circumstances her shoulders grew angular from expectation. She composed her grain.

‘There is a peculiar honesty about the thoughtless kind of furniture,' he said.

She listened to the ticking of the brick house in Birmingham. She listened to the thoughts of Wetherby sluicing the fumed oak.

‘I am writing a poem,' he said. ‘It is the first time it has been written. It has all the ugliness of truth, going in, and in, and in. It will be praised for its Penetration in the
Sunday Times
.'

‘There is a letter, dear,' said the Perennial Blue, with some diffidence of teeth. ‘A letter with a Suffolk postmark.'

Lacking the intuition of furniture, she did not grasp that this was more than a letter, the garrotter's handkerchief and the umbilical cord. She held it in her unsuspecting hands, that the close of a century had designed for charitable acts.

‘Yes, yes,' he said. ‘But I am working. And it will keep.'

As if it really would. He waited painfully, till the door, till he could hide his weakness, but less successfully from the peculiar honesty of furniture. Through her narrow brown face, Theodora watched his hands breaking a letter.

 

… that Saturday was your day, and we waited, though sensing our defeat. Why are you so cruel, Wetherby, when you can afford to be kind? I can only think that this is the privilege of genius. Now it is Monday, and the others are all gone. The garden is full of absence and burning leaves. I lie here on the terrace, with the old grey shawl covering my knees, and have been reading Proust to steady my nerves.
Mais ça m' énerve plus
. It is a great ball of wool. I have been remembering, in contrast, your poem, the one that I like to think mine, because it was the fruit of that long and trying afternoon when you accused
me
of destruction, and said that you preferred to be smothered by feather pillows. Quite often I speak it to myself, my poem. Today, after Proust, it was a sword. My dear, it is
brutal
, but I am proud. I tempered you …

 

After he had read letters Wetherby always tied them in a bundle, so that some day, someone with devotion and tact might fit together the pieces of the puzzle. He put the bundle in a cupboard. Theodora felt her stomach turning and turning to digest.

‘I am a poet,' Wetherby said.

In the brick house in Birmingham Theodora heard his mouse picking at ideas.

‘Or a sword,' he said, ‘hacking at a pylon.'

He rather liked that.

But the
jardin exotique
was all spines. He touched a cactus with repulsion.

‘Perhaps you should forget to think,' said Theodora Goodman, whose shoulders were quite stiff.

‘You are as bad as Lieselotte,' he said. ‘Lieselotte says I am not an artist. But it is Lieselotte's passion to destroy. She says I am not even nothing. If I were nothing I would be magnificent, she says, and then she could love me.'

Now Wetherby began to cough as if he could not breathe the air of the garden, and Theodora could hear his bones. She realized he was all bones, and his breath was spiked. Somewhere inside him fluttered his sick self, trying to break free from the cage of bones.

‘No,' she said. ‘I meant, rather, that man is not a sewing machine.'

‘Are you a Communist?' asked Wetherby.

‘That is the second time I have been asked since I arrived,' said Theodora, ‘and I do not think I know what it is.'

‘I could tell you, but it would take a very long time. And it would not be convincing. Communism is an act of faith. I am a Communist.'

‘I am a man, and you are a man,' said Theodora.

‘That is emotionalism.'

‘It is flesh and blood.'

But Wetherby was walking away.

It should be as simple as doves, felt Theodora, but it was not, but it was not. She looked into her handbag to find some reassuring object, something she had seen before, something all-dimensional. As a child she had resented the indestructibility of objects, before the great millennium of dissolution, the epoch of ideas. I shall know everything, said Theodora in the kitchen. Now at the approach of middle-age and knowledge, she regretted the closed stones, the fossil shells of Meroë.

In the
jardin exotique
, in spite of its impervious forms, of sword, and bulb, and the scarlet, sucking mouths, time con
tinued to disintegrate into a painful, personal music, of which the themes were intertwined. So that it was not possible to withdraw into a comfortable isolation. Theodora sat. Confident her intuition would identify, she waited for Lieselotte to appear.

As she had suspected, Lieselotte was a snowdrop, quivering but green-veined. Depravity had tortured the original wax into lines of purest delicacy. Physical smallness intensified her passion.

‘He has been calling you,' said Theodora.

‘Oh, he!' said Lieselotte. ‘Yes. By nature he is the hero of an operetta. But he chose to be a disinfectant. To disinfect the world.'

‘How many of us,' said Theodora, ‘lead more than one of our several lives?'

Lieselotte compressed her mauve lips, which were outlined very faintly in black, over her wax skin.

‘Perhaps,' she said, ‘I should have been born to a circus. To whip the lions through a paper hoop. But I can smell their coats singe, even though I wasn't.'

‘Are you also the countess?' Theodora asked.

‘My husband was a count. He fell in love a second time, with a myth, but a myth in jackboots. The country where we lived was a country of myths and tapestries and music. The grass beneath the Christmas trees was acid-green. In our forest there was a smell of rot, that was sometimes interesting and sometimes foul.'

In the fairy-tale that Lieselotte told, Theodora expected the candles to be dashed to the ground when doors opened. Wind rushed down the stone passages, swelled beneath the tapestries, till tree and stone and jousting manikins had turned to water, ebbing and flowing where the wall had been.

‘Even in summer,' said Lieselotte, ‘the valleys were full of mist and orange fungus. Brown, wooden men acted a jolly pantomime of respect to please the
Gesellschaft
. They also came to the castle to hear the music that Rudi ordered as his duty towards
Kunst
. In the summer evenings, by torchlight, in the yard of the castle, we listened to more myths. We caught the sickness of the violins. We accepted the myth of love. Music dripped and coated the walls with a glistening moisture of sound.'

Lieselotte laughed.

‘When I painted this music they looked at my pictures and began to suspect my sanity and health.'

Theodora could feel the laughter of Lieselotte, pressed against her body in the cactus cage.

‘Finally Rudi sent me away,' said Lieselotte. ‘Because I am decadent. Rudi is one of the men with golden skins and mackerel eyes, who see the world through water, or through music, and grow drunk on
Ewigkeit
. Tristan and Siegfried, I think, were this way.'

Winding like a horn through the forest, the leaves ebbed and flowed, cupped sometimes also in the memory, to meditate, stagnate, green-bubbled with scum. Theodora listened to Lieselotte's voice.

‘Come with me, please, to my room,' Lieselotte said. ‘You shall see my fever. I also want your protection against those who love me.'

She began to lead Theodora through the passages of the hotel, in which people were apparently reviving themselves, shaking off dreams, sprinkling their faces with water, breaking wind, and putting back their teeth.

‘Listen,' said Lieselotte. ‘They are going to sleep.'

Theodora did not contradict. There were times when she preferred an easy life.

‘Here,' said Lieselotte, ‘is where I live principally. Here you will find my
raison d'être
.'

Theodora saw that they were in a large room, somewhere high, the light purified by an immensity of surrounding space, the walls pierced by the open windows of pictures. And now she was drawn to the many windows, and the world these contained, the hanging gardens flowering with miraculous questions, the glass pagoda from which her own soul looked out, flaming like a bird of paradise.

‘I shall not ask you whether you like my pictures,' Lieselotte said. ‘Because there is no more embarrassing question. This is what
I
think.'

And she took a knife, and she smashed the glass pagoda with its flaming bird.

‘No!' cried Theodora, holding her hands to her head to protect it from the glass which did not fall.

‘Oh, but I am right,' said Lieselotte. ‘We have destroyed so much, but we have not destroyed enough. We must destroy everything, everything, even ourselves. Then at last when there is nothing, perhaps we shall live.'

Her voice continued to hack at the screaming canvases, and Theodora, because she knew that this was not yet her crisis, went away. She went to the garden, because there was nowhere else, even though she would sit there uncomfortably upright on a bench, waiting without mirrors for fresh reflections.

‘Good evening, Ludmilla,' said the General, who was sitting on a small and complicated iron chair, watching a slow snail.

‘I heard that bitch taking you up to her attic.'

‘Yes,' said Theodora. ‘I saw her pictures.'

‘Her
pictures
, did you say?' said Sokolnikov. ‘She is mad.'

But Theodora had now found the answer.

‘Only chairs and tables,' she said, ‘are sane.'

‘She is no more an artist than I am a cook,' the General said.

He spat on the leaf of an aloe, where the spittle lay and glittered, distracting him for a moment by its brightness.

‘
I
am an artist,' said Alyosha Sergei, in a still, convinced voice. ‘Although I cannot produce any material evidence, and it is doubtful whether my sensibility will ever crystallize in just that way. I am the Artist. Very few people have the capacity for creating life, for being. But you cannot deny, Ludmilla, that one moment of my existence is intensely varied, intensely moving. Take that gob of spittle, for instance. A moonstone, a jewel. There is no denying that I am an artist.'