The Aunt's Story (6 page)

‘And fire. A river of fire. And a burning house. Or a bush fire,' Theodora said.

Violet Adams extracted herself cautiously from Theodora's arm. ‘It would be a queer sort of poem,' Violet said.

‘But I shall not write it,' said Theodora. ‘I doubt whether I shall ever write a poem.'

Violet Adams picked bark. She felt that she wanted to drift back into thinking about herself. But she warmed herself on Theodora, even on what she did not understand.

‘Shall we be friends, Theodora?' she said, picking at the bark of the apple tree. ‘And have secrets and things?'

‘I would like to,' said Theodora.

‘All right. Let's,' Violet said.

She came and put her arm round Theodora, and the darkness was warm and close and secretive again. They were one body walking through the trees. Their voices rose and stroked at each other like grey birds. Violet Adams was one mystery which it was possible to touch.

Later, when it was time to go in, to say prayers and brush the teeth, she became a tall pale girl, with a rather flat face, pale gold hair, and a tendency to catarrh. But Theodora loved her out of gratitude.

For Theodora Goodman the pulse of existence quickened. She hesitated less in doorways. She ran into the receiving sun. She sat at the yellow desk, which was no longer hateful, nor the trade winds which Miss Emmy blew, because now Geography was crossed by folded notes and glances behind hands.

Smoothing the electric paper, Theodora read:

 

I have found something
most
important I must see you in the break! Violet A.

P.S
.
Don't forget!!

 

Theodora did not. They went behind the oleander.

‘It is a poem,' said Violet. ‘In a book that I borrowed from Miss Belle's bookcase.'

‘Oh,' said Theodora.

She had not expected, quite. She sensed some reason for distaste, as she looked at the bursting, wadded covers and the brass hasps of Miss Belle's purple book, while Violet Adams was preparing to read.

‘Are you ready?' Violet said.

Theodora saw how very awkward at times her own feet were in their thick, black shoes.

‘Are you listening?' Violet asked. She lifted her upper lip and, with the same reverence and a slight tremor, continued to read:

‘How lovely it is! But how sad!' Violet said, wiping her catarrhal nose.

Theodora said, ‘Yes.'

But although she loved Violet Adams, she did not think that this was altogether her poem, and was glad when she heard the bell go for French.

Theodora Goodman and Violet Adams, their names became linked.

‘Where are Theodora and Violet?' people used to call.

When they lagged beyond the last warning of a bell, when they dragged round the hill, lost in the trees, detached from the wave of girls that flowed on Sundays across the paddocks towards the church, Theodora Goodman and Violet Adams. On Sundays the trees smelt of sleep, and smoke, and crushed ants, and the thin grey, distilled smell that is the smell of trees that have stood a long time in sun. Theodora Goodman and Violet Adams yawned churchward together through the trees. Or they ducked with one head when magpies slashed at their boaters with savage beaks.

‘Theodora, Violet, you must keep up,' panted Miss Emmy, propped for breath on an anthill that she did not much like. ‘Step out, girls. Please! We shall be late.'

Sometimes they were, poured into the throat of the Te Deum,
and the narrow, dusty church. Then they praised the Lord in giggles from the wrong page. They emptied their lungs in terrifying spasms, which strangled the harmonium and filled the church with echoing brass.

On the side against which the girls from Spofforths' sat there was a window with St George. He was mild and smooth as yellow soap, but he had crushed the Dragon. Out of the Dragon's belly had burst peculiar bunches of crimson grapes. This window sanctified the light, which poured rich and bland and purple, even when the shingles were cracking with heat. Theodora washed her hands in purple. She listened coolly to the words that did not touch. Her own mystery offered subtler variations. Her fears were not possessive. She had not yet had occasion to summon God, who remained a bearded benevolence, or a blue and golden scroll above the altar window.

Once Theodora found beneath the pew a crow that had closed its wings and died, stiffer and blacker than old umbrellas. She touched it in the silence between the prayers. The crow was folded as neatly and as decently as a soul should be, the prayer suggested. About her own soul Theodora was not so sure. Mother, for instance, who sat ahead, a firm small outline in bottle green, would give up without hesitation when it was time, a neatly folded soul, because for Mother, you were sure, things existed in hard shapes. Mother had not dissolved at dusk under the apple trees. But sometimes, and even in a strait pew, Theodora's own soul opened and flamed with the light that burst through the Dragon's wounds.

So now she rejected the crow, gently, with her heel. She looked across at Violet Adams, from whom she had been separated on coming into the church. Theodora looked, over the heads of Lottie and Grace, and saw she had left Violet Adams behind. It was less melancholy than inevitable. She did not love Violet less. They could still walk linked through the long grass at dusk, and hate the intruder, but Theodora knew she would also prefer sometimes to risk the darkness and walk alone.

Violet looked at Theodora, through the hymn, over the heads of Grace and Lottie. She smiled the mysterious smile of someone who reads poetry and shares secrets, and Theodora smiled also, because it was true, but that was not all.

Waiting for the hymn to stop, and the voices of girls that praised the Lord in pink and blue, she watched the light blaze through the glass Dragon and gild the nape of Frank Parrott's neck, which was already gold. He sat ahead, a reddish gold.

Afterwards everyone stood about outside the church, and families picked out their own girls, to talk or to take to dinner. The girls were suddenly sheepish then, to find their lives divided into two.

‘You should ask your Violet Adams out to Meroë,' said Mother, waiting for Father to bring round the horses from where they had been nosing chaff behind the church.

‘Not today,' Theodora shrugged.

Because she did not feel there was much connection between Violet Adams and Meroë. She looked at Violet, who was talking hard to Una Russell and pretending not to see. There was no connection at all.

‘No,' Theodora said. ‘Another time.'

And she stepped back, bumping, with a thump that was heard, the hard body of Frank Parrott.

‘Hello, Theo,' laughed Frank. ‘It's a long time. You must get Grace to bring you over. You and Fanny. We must have a picnic.'

Frank, who had harnessed the horses to the sociable the Parrotts used for church, spoke and looked aside. Frank was uneasy in his Sunday clothes, but still a transparent gold that Sunday had not touched. Theodora wanted and wanted not to look. She remembered a red and clumsy boy, and a wart on a hard knee. Now Frank was fine and straight in his wrinkled Sunday pants, and what there was of his moustache was gold.

‘That would be nice. Yes, Frank. We shall speak with Grace,' Theodora said.

Then backed, to escape any possibility of further encounter with Frank Parrott, whose Adam's-apple moved up and down. At the same time she had the impulse to give to someone something, whereas there was nothing, only her hymn book that she held too tightly in her glove. She could not feel her hand.

When Theodora returned, her face still bright, when it was evening, Violet's skin was thick and pale.

‘Well,' Violet said.

‘Oh, it is you,' said Theodora.

It was inevitable.

‘Where did you get to?' Violet said.

‘When?' Theodora asked. She was still dazed.

‘Why, after church,' Violet said.

‘Nowhere. There was such a crush.'

‘I had something to tell you,' said Violet.

‘What?'

‘Aha,' said Violet, with a kind of pale secrecy that would not be read.

But it did not greatly matter what it was that Violet had to tell. And Violet knew. Violet was being a goose, but Theodora could have kissed her, in spite of the goosishness, and the rather shameful voice in which she had read the poem, and the steady seeping of her catarrhal nose. Theodora loved Violet dearly. She could afford to. She was strong.

Theodora waited many days for something to happen, but it did not. Often it does not happen. Theodora often looked at Grace Parrott, who was unperturbed, to see what Grace expected, but Grace did not.

So Theodora said to Grace, in tea, ‘Frank spoke about a picnic.'

‘Oh,' said Grace, disliking a prune. ‘Frank will talk his head off.'

‘I thought,' said Theodora, ‘we might combine. Gertie would make the cakes.'

‘But Frank,' said Grace, ‘is going to Muswellbrook on Friday. He will work on the Thompsons' place. For experience,' she said.

So it was like that, as wrinkled as a prune.

‘Theodora,' Violet Adams said, ‘I want to see you afterwards. It is most important. I have had some news.'

Violèt took Theodora into a corner of the big, dark schoolroom, not outside, which was unusual, but it was unusual news that Violet hinted at. Over the prunes she had tried to make it dark, and now to keep it so, in the deserted schoolroom, into which the light fell only a little way from the glass door, marking the boards for a space, but not the desks, these remained shapes.

Theodora felt, and would feel, blank, whatever Violet might now say. It was only a bare suggestion that Frank Parrott had
made, and as a bare suggestion Grace had disposed of it. Theodora sat and waited for Violet to speak. She sat on a bench beside the big blackboard, on which there was still the figure of a problem, an isosceles triangle it was, that somebody had solved and left. It looked both frightfully simple and frightfully complex. Theodora sat. She felt the chalk dust settle on her. She waited for Violet to say something, to create a fresh figure, and present a similar problem for which a solution would have to be found. These were endless.

‘Well, won't you guess?' Violet asked.

‘I am going to bed soon,' said Theodora. ‘I have a headache.'

Violet laughed. Caught in her own drama, she could not really believe in headaches. Besides, her news had given her an importance that Theodora lacked. She would speak, but the secret could never be equally theirs.

‘I am leaving at the end of the term,' Violet said.

Theodora stirred. The blank that one gesture had rubbed was widened by Violet's words.

‘I am going home,' said Violet. ‘Mother considers I have had enough of school. I shall help with the housekeeping and do the flowers.'

The settled nature of it all made Violet's voice flat and matter of fact. But of course it would happen like this. The answer could have been found at the back of the book.

‘But we shall write to each other, Theo.'

As if, perhaps, she had felt the coldness of her triumph, which now she wanted to warm. Theodora felt on her shoulder Violet's face.

‘And I shall leave soon too,' Theodora said.

Not that this lessened the distance. Violet was already a prisoner in a house, arranging flowers in a cut-glass bowl.

‘Will you be sorry, a little, that I am going?' Violet asked.

She had to probe the darkness, for one or two wounds received.

‘Violet,' said Theodora, ‘you ask me to say such difficult things.'

‘What are you two doing in here?'

It was Una Russell, peering from the doorway.

‘We were talking,' Violet said.

‘Well I never!' said Una Russell.

Theodora went upstairs. She undressed. She lay face down so that she would find a thicker darkness, and lose all expression in the pillow.

Theodora cried, for what she did not ask herself, but it seemed immeasurable, the slow darkness and the days which jerked past. It was as if time were a magic lantern in which it was never omitted to change the slide. So Violet Adams came downstairs in her gloves, after the concert and the cakes, and laughed, and kissed, and cried, and went. So there were berries on the hawthorn tree and frost on the rut. So the lamb was born with two heads in the hollow, and they put it in a jar, in a cupboard at Meroë, to be shown to the curious until its wonder was forgotten.

At Meroë Theodora asked, ‘When shall I be coming home?'

Father said there was no hurry, she would find, there was no hurry for anything.

‘But at Meroë I shall be free,' Theodora said.

‘Free?' said Father. ‘Free from what?'

Handing it back it was a plate of air.

Father's beard smiled and said she had a lot to learn.

Theodora went out. She walked up the black hill, that winter had blackened further, the black cone of Ethiopia that had once flowed fire. Near the summit there stood a wooden house, or what remained of it, a narrow lantern that was somebody's folly. He had lived there with his madness and his dogs until he died, and now there were tins and bones. Theodora sat on a stone which had been part of the foundations of the madman's folly. Nobody knew what his intention had been. Only that he had built this house and lived and died.