The Aunt's Story (7 page)

It was both desolate and soothing to sit on the black hill. There are certain landscapes in which you can see the bones of the earth. And this was one. You could touch your own bones, which is to come a little closer to truth. After the secrets and quotations, the whispers in the orchard at Spofforths'. Now the ghost of Violet Adams had begun to be expelled. She could not endure the bones and stones. Though Theodora bowed her head. It is still possible to love the ghost that has been exorcised. There remains the need.

On the whole Theodora felt older. At Spofforths' she felt older anyway, and particularly when the letter from Violet came.
Violet had found time between keeping house and doing the flowers.

Violet had a talent for writing. She could compose.

‘Theodora has a letter,' said Una Russell.

‘It is from Violet Adams,' said Theodora. ‘She sends you all her love.'

She held the corner on the candle. She watched the paper curl.

‘Won't you give it us to read?' cried Una.

‘There is no need,' said Theodora.

She watched the paper curl and flame, and it was for the burning of flesh that she winced.

‘Oh, it was one of those letters,' said Una Russell, and she
shook her bangles, because she hated Theodora still, she hated what was unexplained.

‘Violet Adams was a little insipid poor thing,' Una Russell said.

She could not watch Theodora enough, whose face was as yellow as a candle, but candlelight does not reveal.

Theodora burned the letter because it was both like and unlike Violet Adams. It was after all the letter that you would expect Violet to write, telling nothing at all. I wonder what it was, said Theodora, after the candles had been snuffed, what it was that I saw in Violet Adams. She decided that she would not think about the letter, but it kept recurring, like something she had done herself.

‘I wonder what you will do?' Violet Adams had said.

And again, ‘You will be leaving soon, Theodora. I wonder if you have thought about the future,' Miss Spofforth asked.

Theodora had gone into Miss Spofforth's dark room, the Study it was called, to take the book for which Miss Spofforth had sent. She had not bargained for this. Now she was caught in the wide spaces between the bookcase and the fire, becalmed in her own silence and uncertainty. Fire fell from the logs into the winter afternoon, but did not warm. A cold laurel pressed against the window out of the winter wind.

‘Have you thought how you can live most profitably?' Miss Spofforth asked.

And the dark square of her face struggled to open. She very much wanted to communicate.

‘No,' said Theodora. ‘I shall go home, for the present. I shall live—well, as I have always lived.'

Because living was still something that happened in spite of yourself. She did not really believe, as apparently Miss Spofforth did, that you could turn living to profit.

‘There is a great deal that happens,' she said.

‘I am sure,' Miss Spofforth agreed.

She watched Theodora's hands move as if they were about to reach out and touch something.

‘And provided one is happy, it does not much matter where,' Miss Spofforth said.

Miss Spofforth had made her own happiness, solid and un
moved as mahogany, and Miss Spofforth was unpleased. She listened to the rooms of the house around her, which was her solidly founded, profitable happiness, but the rooms did not communicate. And outside, the leaf of the cold laurel was stroking space. But this is ridiculous, Miss Spofforth said.

‘I expect you will also marry,' she said, with the bright smile she offered to parents of backward or headstrong children. ‘Most of the girls do.'

‘I had not thought about it,' Theodora said.

She did not want this thrust at her. She did not believe in it very strongly, nor in Miss Spofforth's bright smile, which did not fit her face.

‘That may be. You are not that kind of girl,' Miss Spofforth said.

And she sighed. Because she would have offered this girl her wisdom and her kindness, of which really Miss Spofforth had much. She would have touched her hand and said: Theodora, I shall tell you the truth. Probably you will never marry. We are not the kind. You will not say the things they want to hear, flattering their vanity and their strength, because you will not know how, instinctively, and because it would not flatter
you
. But there is much that you will experience. You will see clearly, beyond the bone. You will grow up probably ugly, and walk through life in sensible shoes. Because you are honest, and because you are barren, you will be both honoured and despised. You will never make a statue, nor write a poem. Although you will be torn by all the agonies of music, you are not creative. You have not the artist's vanity, which is moved finally to express itself in its objects. But there will be moments of passing affection, through which the opaque world will become transparent, and of such a moment you will be able to say—my dear child.

All these things would have been said by Miss Spofforth if they had struggled out of her squat body and her heavy face. Instead she opened the book and murmured, ‘Well, that will be all, Theodora.'

‘Thank you, Miss Spofforth,' Theodora said.

There was no reason to remain, except to extract the most from a sense of warmth. The fire had settled now, she noticed. She looked curiously at the face above the open book, and left.

W
HEN
Theodora returned home, and Fanny followed, after a term or two, this was the beginning of a fresh phase at Meroë. It became the home of the Goodman girls, and people spoke of it in this sense. It was no longer a low, flat, sprawling yellow house, seen against dead trees, a mass of stone that the past had heaved up, much as the hills round Meroë had heaved out their black volcanic rock, and closed, and the rock remained, dead, suggestive but dead. This was no longer Meroë. When the Goodman girls returned home, at once the place had a future, you felt. People looked at the house from the road, from their drays, carts, sulkies, buggies, and sociables, going to town. People looked to see whether the chairs were filled or not with morning gowns, or whether a group in the rose garden at the side might be credited with an interesting situation. Actually the house at Meroë, even now, did not give many clues, but this did not discourage the sideways glance. To see whether the Goodman girls. Or Miss Fanny, rather. It amounted to Miss Fanny. Though Miss Theo has a good heart, Mrs Stepper said. But sort of sawny. So it amounted to Miss Fanny Goodman, who bought a ribbon at Spurgeon's and said: I am at my wit's end, whether to take the shell-pink or the rose, you, Mr Spurgeon, must help me choose. It kind of made you feel you revolved. And Meroë, to which they turned their eyes from the road, from their drays, carts, sulkies, buggies, and sociables, this was the centre, because it had Fanny Goodman in it.

‘Oh, Theo, it is lovely to be home, to be free,' Fanny said.

‘Yes,' said Theodora, ‘it is lovely.'

And they looked out, the Goodman girls, linked at the window by the moment of discovery, of the bald hills for the first time, and the winding creek. Their cheeks touched as they made this similar voyage. They shivered with their pleasure, and their blood ran together. Fanny is a rose, felt Theodora, but I am a
lesser rose on the same stem. And it soothed, it soothed, the flesh of the rose that lay along your cheek.

Actually life at Meroë was not much different when the Goodman girls came home. Father still sat beside the pines, at least in body, or he rode round the place and looked at the fences that had fallen down. And the cows wound into the yard at evening to be milked. And Gertie Stepper punched the dough. Only the sea-green mirror at the end of the passage near the sewing room gave up different shapes, the mysterious elongated forms of young women in long dresses.

‘Now that you girls are home,' said Mother, ‘there's a lot that you'll be able to take off my hands.'

Not that Mother ever had very much on her hands, not that you would notice. She sat on her sofa, like a marble statue wearing silk, and read Hérédia and Leconte de Lisle. To Mrs Goodman everything had a form, like bronze or marble. She saw clearly, but not far. She saw the cattle going down to drink. She saw the sunlight as it lay among the brushes on her dressing table. She heard the passage of her own silk.

The mother of Mrs Goodman had been French, they said, or Austrian, or Portuguese, anyway foreign, which made Mrs Goodman somehow foreign and strange who could speak languages and read them, somebody said even Russian. She was an educated, a clever woman. And pretty when she was young, small and bright. Her hands were small and bright with rings. But hard as a diamond. She had a temper, Julia Goodman. The time she took her riding crop and beat the window in the dining-room because the horses were not brought round, beat the window with the handle of her riding crop, and the glass shivered, and she beat, she beat the jags that were left in the frame. Well, everybody said, this is what George Goodman has taken on.

To those who could not remember, Julia Goodman mostly sat on her sofa and was small and still. She rolled her hands into a tight small ivory ball, studded with diamond or emerald or garnet, just according, but her hands were always hard with rings.

‘… to take off my hands,' Mrs Goodman said when the girls came home. ‘Now that I am the mother of two young women, I can enjoy the luxury of growing old.'

And her sigh prepared for the softening of age, only it did not come, or not much, apart from a slight slackening of the skin. Watching her girls, Fanny who was pretty and the disappointing Theodora, her eyes were bright inside the bone, they could still shiver glass.

Sometimes Theodora, now that some of the pieces of the puzzle had begun to slide into place, wondered at the unaccountability of human nature, why Father should have married Mother, or Mother Father. They sat in their own rooms, and there was more than the house between; or they met at the round mahogany table, where their words bobbed and sank, bobbed and sank, in the shiny silences. They were the words spoken by two people to describe the business of living together in the same house, in which a chimney sometimes smoked, or a window stuck, and outside, the property, where a cow calved or apples were destroyed by moth. All this continued because it had been begun. It continued because they had stopped seeing what had happened. Acceptance becomes a long sleep. And if Julia Goodman took a knife and turned it in her husband's side to watch the expression on his face and scent the warm blood that flowed, George Goodman stirred in his sleep and changed position to another dream, of mortgages perhaps, or drought, or fire.

More actual even than the dream of actuality was the perpetual odyssey on which George Goodman was embarked, on which the purple water swelled beneath the keel, rising and falling like the wind of pines on the blue shore of Ithaca. George Goodman sat with his beard spread above the book. The words in his mouth were as smooth and hard and round and tangible and bright as pebbles that the sea has made to glisten. And the names. When Theodora came into the room, into the green, cold soughing of the pines, his eyes, she saw, had not returned.

‘It is cold in here,' she said, and stooped.

She raked the coals to sparks and threw on another knot of wood.

‘Have you ever thought, Theodora,' Father said, ‘about Nausicaä, the name? It is as smooth and straight and tough as an arrow.'

She put a rug across his shoulders, because it was cold in the
room at that time of year. In the middle of the day the white light would splinter through the pines.

‘An arrow,' she said, ‘tipped with white. A swan's feather.'

Because this was something in which they indulged, sometimes casually over the shoulder, to throw to Father the bright, coloured ball. So now she laughed and threw it as she moved towards the door, her brown face, her black hair, glistening under a beaver skin.

‘I am going,' she laughed, caught still in this last mood, ‘I am going to walk down towards the bridge. Because my feet have died.'

‘There will be another black frost,' said George Goodman, returning out of the distance.

He said it with an air of surprise, as if it were too sudden, to find himself again in the dream of actuality. His eyes were almost feverish above the grey thicket of his beard. He is old now, she sighed. She has grown, he said, straight as a brown arrow. And as she left, he smiled.

Theodora took down a gun from the rack in the passage. She took down one of Father's guns, because in time the little rifle had become a polished toy. She let herself out by the side door, under the pines, into the blast of frost, in which her brittle body soon trumpeted its own silver. Consoled by the weight of the gun on her arm, she walked fast on the ringing frost. She walked among the tussocks with the long strides that made them say as Theo Goodman was some bloke in skirts.

How white the skies were at Meroë, wintertime. For years she remembered the winter skies, the pale watered silk. And sound coming from a long way, a calf, or horse's feet. A horse's feet, in winter, came up the road and over the bridge as steady as drums.

‘Hey, Theo!' called the man's voice.

She stopped to look, through her tears that the frost had made, at a face she could not see.

‘You won't catch much today,' called the man. ‘They're all frozen stiff.'

That, she saw then, as he bent down towards her over the pommel, was Frank Parrott in a full moustache. His eyes were blue and watery with the cold.

‘Oh,' she said, ‘it's you.'

‘Yes,' he said, ‘it's me. I'll take you on one day,' he said. ‘I'll bring a gun. I'll put you through your paces.'

‘There was also to be a picnic,' she said.

He looked at her out of his blank blue eyes. ‘What picnic?' he asked.

She drew down the corners of her mouth and said that it did not matter.

‘What picnic?' said Frank.

‘Are you here for long?' she asked.

‘It all depends.'

But with no indication how. He stared down out of his mystified blue eyes, which reminded her, she laughed, of the eyes of a young bull.

‘Yes,' said Frank, ‘I shall come down and take you on.'

And his horse danced. A horse always danced under Frank Parrott. Whenever he rode there was a fine piece of bravura, a jingling of metal.

‘I shall wait,' she called, watching him.

Now, now that she could watch him with calm eyes, she did so with pleasure, but sceptically, the red, arched neck of the young bull that she would have loved to touch, to put her hand on his poll. Frank made her feel experienced, but when he cantered off, her smile dropped. She was not quite sure.

Anyway, this time Frank did as he promised. Frank came. He rode through the laurels in a jingling of metal, jumped down with a great report, and there he stood, a reddish gold, against the yellow stone of Meroë. Theodora said: Oh, well.

‘And I shall come,' said Fanny as they took their guns, ‘even though I don't shoot. To see Theo make a fool of Frank.'

Fanny pursed her mouth and held her head on one side in order to show the savages she was whimsically superior. Fanny's face bloomed in the frost beside Frank's red gold. Why, God, am I this? Theodora asked, knowing that expectation and the temperature had turned her skin a deeper yellow. Now the weight of her gun would not console.

They walked round the side of the hills, the black cone, and, springing from its side, the little, blunter knob. There was a
cleft between, from which some ragged trees sprang, instead of smoke. And soon they began to see the ruins of the madman's folly higher up on the cone.

‘Don't let's go up there,' said Fanny, pulling in her neck.

‘Why,' asked Frank.

‘It gives me the creeps. That side of the hill. Do you remember old Mr Lestrange, how mad? I went up there once, a long time ago, and he was chewing a piece of bacon rind. Quite mad. And bristles on him, like a red pig.'

Fanny's face became with her adventure exquisitely funny, in its disgust and fear delicately pink. She pulled at a piece of grass and giggled. Frank laughed too. He could not look at her enough.

‘A rum old cove,' said Frank. ‘But I can't remember.'

‘Nor can Fanny,' said Theodora. ‘Mr Lestrange died when she was two.'

‘But I can, I can!' cried Fanny. ‘You are quite wrong, Theodora. I can remember-his red bristles.'

‘Mr Lestrange,' said Theodora, ‘was black.'

‘Anyway,' said Fanny, she shook her head, ‘it gives me the creeps up there. How are we going to shoot at something when nothing ever comes?'

She looked about, a little too keen, confident that her failure would not detract. She could feel his eyes. He would swallow down any little prettiness she might perpetrate. She could hear Theodora kicking at a piece of stone.

‘Look,' cried Fanny, ‘there are rabbits. Now,' she said, ‘you can shoot.'

She gave it to them, but not without contempt, brushing it off her hands.

Frank shot. He missed. There was no subtraction from the scrambling of the rabbit scuts. Theodora took aim. Then they watched the tumbling uncontrol of fur. For a moment time had been put off its course. The fur subsided on the earth. The silence trembled, ticked, ran. It had begun again.

‘One to you,' said Frank.

His face was redder than from cold. He slapped the butt of his gun with a large hand.

‘I told you,' said Fanny, ‘that Theo would thrash you.'

But she touched his arm to soften the blow, and her glance excluded Theodora.

They began to walk again. Near the warrens the other side of the hill there were many rabbits, scuttering or still. There was shooting enough. Altogether, in the afternoon, Frank Parrott shot six rabbits. He began to hum. He told them about the time he swam the Barwon River in flood.

‘Come on now, Theo,' Frank said, ‘you're not up to form.'

Because, after the first shot, Theodora had not shot another.

‘It's your day,' she said.

She walked, and thought: He is like a big balloon that I hold at the end of a string, tightly when I shot the rabbit, but then he soared, as I let him out, giving him the string, the sky. Because the rest of the afternoon she had aimed a little to the right. She had wanted to. She had wanted to feel his child's pleasure soar, and say this is mine.

‘It's all very stupid.' Fanny yawned. ‘I shall drink gallons of tea.'

Theodora heard Frank's breathing. She did not altogether like her power. So she listened to his breathing dominate her silence, and this was better.

Until the little hawk floated, on his upstretched wings, out of the drained sky, to fold himself, to settle on a white bough.

‘We'll have a smack at that,' said Frank, already at his shoulder.

‘No,' said Theodora, ‘not the little hawk.'

Because she remembered the red eye, and for a moment she quivered, and the whole hillside, in some other upheaval of mythical origin. She knew the white air, closer than a sheath, and the whole cold world was a red eye.

But she said quietly enough, ‘Not the hawk. Please.'

But Frank had fired.

And they watched the hawk unfold his wings, drawn upward off his branch, stream out into long and lovely distances. Because Frank had missed.