The Aunt's Story (3 page)

Then they were both silent, as if consumed by Mother's fire.

‘The Indies,' Mother breathed.

That was Long Acre. But there had been the other trips, to Europe twice, and to India, from which many things were brought back, in silk and glass and mahogany, as well as a brass filigree ball that the Indians used to fill with fire. When Father and Mother had gone, and the rooms of the house were shut, there was this to look forward to, the things that would be brought back. Sometimes the rooms were shut for a long time, and it was like living outside a house, into which you looked occasionally through a window at the frozen furniture. The shut
rooms sound like music boxes that have stopped playing. You hold your ear against the sides, which contain a creaking, of music waiting to burst out as soon as somebody touches the spring. It was like this too with the closed rooms, waiting for someone to walk in and coax life from the furniture.

‘You must be good children,' Mother said thoughtfully. ‘And behave. And brush your teeth. And practise your scales.'

She said it through her green veil, moistening her lips slightly with her tongue. The boxes had been locked that morning and sent to town in the spring cart. And now she sat putting in time, waiting for the buggy to come round. She turned her head this way and that. She touched the bow on Fanny's hair. Mother did not kiss. Or not much. And then only Fanny.
My pretty little parakeet
. Mother liked better to arrange things, the ornaments in cabinets, or on little tables in the drawing-room, then to sit and watch what she had done.

Once there were the new dresses that were put on for Mother's sake.

‘Oh,' she cried, ‘Fanny, my roses, my roses, you are very pretty.'

Because Fanny was as pink and white as roses in the new dress.

‘And Theo,' she said, ‘all dressed up. Well, well. But I don't think we'll let you wear yellow again, because it doesn't suit, even in a sash. It turns you sallow,' Mother said.

So that the mirrors began to throw up the sallow Theodora Goodman, which meant who was too yellow. Like her own sash. She went and stood in the mirror at the end of the passage, near the sewing room which was full of threads, and the old mirror was like a green sea in which she swam, patched and spotted with gold light. Light and the ghostly water in the old glass dissolved her bones. The big straw hat with the little yellow buds and the trailing ribbons floated. But the face was the long, thin, yellow face of Theodora Goodman, who they said was sallow. She turned and destroyed the reflection, more especially the reflection of the eyes, by walking away. They sank into the green water and were lost.

There were many bitter days at Meroë when the roselight hardened and blackened. The earth was hollow with black frost,
and the grass lanced the air with silver spears. Then the hands stuck to the music, beating out the icy bars of a nocturne, which were stiff and blunt when they should have sailed out as smooth and continuous as a wedge of swans. Not this nocturne that beat its little glass hammer at Meroë.

Mother's voice crackled at the fire. She warmed her rings. Her small head was as bright and as hard as a garnet beside the fire.

‘No, no, Theodora,' crackled Mother. ‘Not that way. Where is your feeling?' she said. ‘This horrible up and down. Can't you feel it flow? Here, give it to me.'

As if it were a thing. But Mother sat down. She played the music as it should have been played. She took possession of the piano, she possessed Chopin, they were hers while she wanted them, until she was ready to put them down. Only, watching the hands of Mother, which always did what they wanted to, Theodora was not moved. The music had lost its meaning, even the meaning that lay in the stiff up and down, the agonizing angularity that Chopin had never meant to be, but which was part of some inner intention of her own.

‘The piano is not for Theodora,' Mother sighed. ‘Fanny is the musical one.'

Fanny could play a piece, and it was a whole bright, tight bunch of artificial flowers surrounded by a paper frill. Fanny played her piece. And when she had played it, it was finished. She jumped up, and laughed, and was content.

Outside though, beyond the fire and the carpets and the last notes of Fanny's completed piece, there was the long, black, bitter sweep of the hills. Theodora walked in the garden of dead roses. One of the hills, they said, which was now dead, had once run with fire, its black cone streaming, but now it brooded black against the white sky. Only if you walked on the side of the hill there was a last flicker of gold from the wattles, of which the bark oozed a deeper golden gum, so that the rock gave up some of its blackness, the hill melted and flamed still.

Down the road from the direction of the hills the Syrian came from time to time. He came into sight at the bend in the road, where his wheels thrashed, splashing through the brown water
of the ford. From a good distance you could see the dirty canvas swaying and toppling above the cart, and there was time to shout a warning, to call, ‘The Syrian! Here comes the Syr-i-urn!'

This made everyone run out of the house, everyone from the back of the house - that is, Gertie Stepper, and Pearl Brawne, and Tom Wilcocks, and Fanny, and any old man who was being given tea. Everyone ran out. It made quite a scattering of fowls.

Gertie said the Syrian sold trash, but everybody liked to buy, and Gertie even, to touch and choose. It was exciting as the cart grated through the yard. Turkeys gobbled. Dogs barked. The day was changed, which once had been flat as a pastry board. Now it was full of talk, and laughing, and the whining of the Syrian's mangy dog, and the jingled harness of his old blue horse. Now there was no question of work, now that the Syrian had come.

The Syrian himself was dry and brown, with blue tattoo marks on his hands. The eyes were deep and dark in the bones of his face. But they did not tell much, nor did his voice, in the language that he talked. When the Syrian became intelligible, he spoke in shillings, or with his brown hands. He uncovered his brown teeth in a clockwork smile. Out of the cart, from under the old tarpaulin, he brought the openwork stockings, the ribbons, the shawls, the mouth-organs, the safety-pins, and the pen-knives that he sold.

Once there was a silver shawl. Horiental, said Gertie Stepper. He tossed it out for everyone to see. How it blew in the winter wind! It streamed like a fall of silver water from the Syrian's hand.

‘Oooooh!' everybody cried.

And, ‘Oo-
er
,' said Pearl Brawne.

But Gertie Stepper, she got red, all except her pinched-up mushroom nose, and she hit at the brown knuckles with an iron spoon.

‘Hey, you,' said Gertie. ‘You no good. No good shawl. You think I no see, eh?'

And now it was a fact. The splendid shawl that everyone had pushed to see was a poor, ragged, flapping thing that fell. It lay exposed on the hard ruts. The Eastern shawl had a hole in the corner, which the Syrian had held hidden in his hand.

‘Cheap. Very cheap.' He smiled and pointed.

‘Yairs, yairs,' said Gertie. ‘That may be, Mr Ali Baba. You can keep that to tell in court.'

Then everybody laughed, even Gertie Stepper, almost, from behind her tin-rimmed spectacles that were mended with a piece of string.

Once when the Syrian left, Theodora went with him some of the way. In the white-lit winter evening her legs grew longer with the strides she took. Her hair flew. She had increased. She walked outside a distinct world, on which the grass quivered with a clear moisture, and the earth rang. In this state, in which rocks might at any moment open, or words convey meaning, she stood and watched the Syrian go. His silence slipped past. The hills settled into shapelessness. She was left with the trembling of her knees.

Afterwards, trailing through the shrunk yard, there was no external evidence that the Syrian had been. The meat-safe still creaked on its wire hook, and the kitchen window's yellow square denied the immensity of shapelessness. Even Theodora Goodman's hair hung meekly in damp tails.

‘Wherevcrvyoubeen, Theo?' asked Gertie Stepper.

‘I walked some way with the Syrian.'

‘That dirty Syrian hawker man! Don't you never do that again!'

‘Oo-
er
,' said Pearl Brawne, and she giggled into tea.

The kitchen was bright, white. It's warmth nuzzled, like fur.

‘Theo, fancy,' Fanny said. ‘And it's dark too. I'd be afraid.'

Fanny was often afraid. She sat up in bed and screamed when the nightlight sank in the saucer. But in the mornings Fanny shone. In the mornings Fanny took her basket, after she had practised scales, which were always so smooth and pleasing to Mother. She sat and rocked on the veranda, under the hanging maidenhair. She pursed up her mouth, to amuse, and said, ‘Now I shall do my broidery.'

She stitched a man in a cocked hat, and a train with smoke in its funnel, and a border of morning glories. And in the middle of it all she stitched:

FANNY GOODMAN

1899

‘There, Theodora. Look at your sister,' said Mother.

‘Oh, leave me alone,' Theodora cried. ‘I am all right.'

Because she felt her own awkwardness. After she had hidden in the garden, she looked at her hands, that were never moved to do the things that Fanny did. But her hands touched, her hands became the shape of rose, she knew it in its utmost intimacy. Or she played the nocturne, as it was never meant, expressing some angular agony that she knew. She knew the extinct hills and the life they had once lived.

‘Let us play at houses,' Fanny said. ‘I shall have a house with twenty rooms. In one room there will be ivory, and in another gold, and another amethyst. I am going to dust the ornaments with a feather duster. I have children too, but they will not be allowed in these rooms, in case they are boisterous and knock over my things. You are my husband, Theo, but you will be out most of the day, riding round the place. You have many sheep, and you will make a great deal of money, and buy me diamonds and lovely furs. In the whole district there is no one as rich as us. Listen, Theo, look! How can you play if you don't listen?'

‘Yes? Tell me,' Theodora said.

And she returned. She stood to learn the rules of the game that she must play.

Fanny made many rules. She thought of many clever games, which were like the swift, smooth music that she played, or the morning glories that she stitched. There they were. Mother was proud.

‘Fanny is the
artistic
one, Mrs Parrott,' Mother said.

‘But Theodora,' said Father, ‘has great understanding.'

‘Of course,' said Mrs Parrott, who looked frightened, as if it were the first time she had been given this to eat.

‘Theodora,' she said, ‘is a good, bright girl. She is always very polite.'

Mrs Parrott had a weak voice. To assist it she had to suck a lozenge, of which she kept a supply in a little silver box. Her bag was full of rich things, but she was a thin and sandy woman, pale, like her voice, and the pale things she said.

‘Children are funny little things,' said Mrs Parrott.

Whenever she came to the house, Father usually left. Father
said, ‘Come on, Theo. You and I shall go out and shoot.

She had a small rifle which she took on these occasions, and which was the cause of many arguments. Because Mother hated and despised Theodora's rifle. She said it was unseemly for a girl to traipse about the country with a gun. But Father stood firm. This was something, he said, that Mother would not understand. It was wrong and unreasonable, Mother said. It was something, said Father, that he could not very well explain. Anyway, Theodora kept her rifle.

Because of the many words that it had caused, she never mentioned it. She took it down in silence from the rack on the wall outside Father's door, and the weight of the rifle, and the smoothness of its wood, and the coldness of its dark, keen metal, together with other circumstances, added solemnity to her act. On afternoons when she went shooting she let herself out by the side door to avoid the heat of argument. The side door opened on to the pines, and for many years Theodora connected the hush of dead needles and the sound of living pines with the smooth, clean, oily smell of her little rifle.

It hung rather too heavy from her bony shoulder, as she made her legs keep pace with Father. Her joints appeared excessively loose. Theo should have been a boy, they said, the more obliging ones, hoping to make the best. But she herself had never considered what could not have been such a different state. Life was divided, rather, into the kinder moments and the cruel, which on the whole are not conditioned by sex.

Anyway, carrying the rifle, she was free. They walked through the paddocks, through the yellow tussocks, where the sloughed snakeskin chafed and chattered, through the grey, abstracted, skeleton trees, and past the big black boulders that the hills had tossed out before they cooled. Father did not speak. He respected silence, and besides, whether it was summer or winter, the landscape was more communicative than people talking. It was close, as close as your own thought, which was sometimes heavy and painful as stone, sometimes ran lighter than a wagtail, or spurted like a peewit into the air.

From the rise above the swamp Father would aim at a rabbit scut. Theodora aimed too. She was everything in imitation, and because of this the importance of what she did was intense. The
rifle kicked her shoulder lovingly. She loved, too, the smell of shooting, its serious pungency, which the wind puffed back into her nose, and which afterwards remained, sharp and flinty, on her hands. She took her hands to tea unwashed, with a sense that this was something the others could not share.

‘Perhaps after all pretty futile,' Father once said, breaking open his gun over the carcass of a rabbit.

The voice did not immediately convey. She had bent to touch the body of the still-warm rabbit. The killing did not move her after a time, as it did at first, the blood beating in her own heart. In time, behind the rifle, she became as clear and white as air, exalted for an act of fate and beauty that would soon take place, of which her finger had very little control, it was an instrument.