The Aunt's Story (30 page)

Here the air had begun to rub. Mist strayed along the skin, dissolved the substance of rock and tree, and confused the in
tentions still further. Many little anxious paths dispersed through the stiff heather. Goats sprang, scattering their dung. If I were to cross this ridge, she said, suddenly abrupt with purpose in the afternoon, I shall see the stone tower, if this also has not dispersed.

From the pink house beside the poplars the woman in the periwinkle dress watched some
Anglaise
making a walk without a hat. Outside the house the rosemary bushes were spread with shirts. The woman in the periwinkle dress had come outside to inspect her washing. Now she felt it carefully for damp. She twitched a sheet that twigs had made mountainous.

Was it this way to the tower? Theodora asked.

She stood by the gate of the pink house. She waited to hear words. The woman's arms were white with flour. Theodora waited for one word, out of a lost epoch, shaped and baked in kitchens.

Yes, said the periwinkle woman, it was this way to the tower, it was past the olive field and the well, though it was the habit of people to make this walk by road.

The woman pointed with her white arm. There was no doubt that the strayed
Anglaise
would find the tower. But strange, the strange
Anglaise
. The woman gathered up her washing. She carried the armful of stiff white sheets into her square pink house, out of the mist.

Theodora walked straight. A smell of soap and baking had lessened the influence of Sokolnikov. She would hedge the olive field, as the woman had advised. She walked almost joyfully. Beside the field she heard the great, sounding depth of the open well, of which the stone lip had sucked moisture from the air. The tower too would have filled with mist, and the intolerable, pervasive smell of crushed nettles.

From the spine of the hill Theodora saw the tower. It was strong and solitary and white. But whether its thick walls enclosed, in addition to damp, the smell of nettles, and possibly a dead bird, some personal exaltation or despair, was as obscure as the alleged moment in which Napoleon split the historical darkness of that part of the coast.

But I have come here for a purpose, Theodora said, if only to be confronted with my own inadequacy. At a distance her
mouth contracted under the coldly sensual lips of stone. She began to go down.

She went quickly, quicker, now that she saw. She saw the solitary figure, moving among rocks, away from the tower, out of her line of vision. She could not identify, but she could hope, but she could run. A bird whirred out of the heather. She was hardly conscious of the intervening stones, or the ankles in which she trusted, though these were thick as sticks. Some animal, rabbit or hare, cowered and leapt away in terror hearing her torn breath.

Then she began to call with what was left.

‘Katina! Katina! Katina Pavlou!' Theodora called.

Out of the blur of wind and running, on the now settled shoulder of the hill, the face of Katina Pavlou turned.

‘Why, Miss Goodman, it is you,' Katina Pavlou said.

Touching with her feet the obvious red coast road, Theodora Goodman gathered her awkwardness.

‘Yes,' she said. ‘I came.'

‘How funny you look. And without a hat,' Katina Pavlou said.

Her voice was cold. Her voice was as cold as stone.

‘I left on the spur of the moment. And I walked farther than I thought. Now I am out of breath,' Theodora Goodman said.

They began to walk along the coast road which would lead eventually to houses.

‘The mist is unexpected, I believe,' Theodora said, ‘for this time of year.'

‘The mist?' said Katina Pavlou coldly.

Her head was turned, so that she was looking at the sea. Her hair hung, in some fresh way it had been done, Theodora Goodman saw, for some purpose. The hair, the body of Katina Pavlou, were conscious and intent.

‘Oh, let us walk. Let us get it over quickly,' Katina Pavlou said. ‘This is a hateful road.'

She walked quicker. She walked too quickly. Katina Pavlou was going over, Theodora saw, she was going over all the time on the new high heels that she had begun to wear.

‘Katina dear,' Theodora Goodman said.

She took the cold, dead hand, that she would begin to warm.
Her face began to fumble with words, and a rather stupid kind of happiness, that was also painful.

‘Yes, Katina,' she said, ‘this is always a long and intolerable stretch of road, but it is not interminable.'

I am quite, quite stupid, Theodora felt, I can feel it on my face.

But Katina Pavlou looked at the sea. And along the red coast road the enclosed automobiles pressed towards expensive pleasures. Faces eyed for a moment people who walk.

‘Have you ever been inside the tower, Miss Goodman?' Katina Pavlou asked.

And now Theodora felt inside her hand the hand coming alive. She felt the impervious lips of stone forming cold words. She dreaded, in anticipation, the scream of nettles.

‘No,' said Theodora, ‘I have not been inside the tower. I imagine there is very little to see.'

‘There is nothing, nothing,' Katina said. ‘There is a smell of rot and emptiness.'

But no less painful in its emptiness, Theodora felt.

‘Still, I am glad,' said Katina Pavlou, speaking through her white face. ‘You know, Miss Goodman, when one is glad for something that has happened, something nauseating and painful, that one did not suspect. It is better finally to know.'

Under the still skin of Katina Pavlou's face the blood had not yet begun again to flow. Since yesterday, Theodora saw, the bones had come.

‘And what has happened in the meantime?' Katina Pavlou asked, as they re-entered the territory of Dubonnet and Suze.

‘I doubt whether I am better informed than you,' Theodora replied. ‘There was, of course, the failure of the municipal power. Here is Miss Grigg. Judging from her appearance darkness will reign.'

‘Yes, imagine, Katina,' said Miss Grigg, who was standing squarely on the step. ‘How we shall manage to fork our food into our mouths is something only the Almighty knows.'

But Monsieur Durand said, ‘There shall be lamps and candles.' And there were.

There were lamps and candles. There was the legendary light
of oil and wax. There was the light of light. Now that Theodora had stitched her skirt, which had torn on a bush somewhere on a hillside, and washed away the dust, and the water had tightened round the edges of her face, she watched with pleasure the renewed objects of the dining-room. She did not eat much. She watched Katina Pavlou scooping the avocado. By lamplight, movement was smooth, the flesh as suave as avocados. The eyelids on Katina Pavlou's face were still and golden, but uncommunicative. Tonight the faces at their separate tables did not communicate, and Theodora was relieved that they should remain contained, whether by exhaustion or some instinct for secrecy.

Only Mrs Rapallo's table had not flowered. Here the light shrivelled into shadow and the upright box of Ryvita, with which normally Mrs Rapallo made havoc of silences.

‘Where is Mrs Rapallo?' Theodora asked.

‘
Elle n'est pas descendue
,' replied
le petit. ‘Elle ne mange guère. Enfin
,
ça ne vaut pas la peine de descendre
,
et quand on risque de se casser la figure
.'

Scarcely pausing in his saraband of plates, his body moved with the smoothness of contempt and custom.
Le petit
had pinched off a cigarette and stuck it behind his ear. He had a merciless continuity. And Mrs Rapallo's Ryvita stood still.

‘Thank you. Yes, I shall take coffee,' Theodora agreed.

Because to refuse
le petit
required daring. Or to dare the stairs, she considered, after the wry, medicinal coffee, the inhabited undergrowth of Mrs Rapallo's room.

On the whole, she knew, there was less daring than duty in her knuckle.

‘Mrs Rapallo?' she knocked. ‘It is Theodora Goodman. May I come in?'

Through some distance and the flat door she heard the sounds of revival.

‘Theodora who?' said Mrs Rapallo. ‘Oh. Yes. You. Come inside, Theodora Goodman. I shall, of course, be glad.'

‘What is the matter, Mrs Rapallo?' asked Theodora as her feet slid across the faces of old envelopes.

‘I am sick, Theodora Goodman,' Mrs Rapallo said.

‘Oh,' said Theodora. ‘Where?'

‘Nowhere in particular,' Mrs Rapallo said. ‘That is to say,
je suis ennuyée
,
je suis ennuyée un tout petit peu de tout
.'

‘That is not fatal,' said Theodora.

‘Well,' replied Mrs Rapallo, ‘I am not sure.'

Mrs Rapallo lolled, both her head and voice. It is unusual, Theodora Goodman felt, for Mrs Rapallo, whose words are as stiff as biscuits. But it was not possible to deny the sinuous expression of floating in Mrs Rapallo's eyes.

‘There are ways and means, of course,' said Mrs Rapallo with a smooth smile, arranging her scalp where the hair had been.

Then Theodora remembered
le petit paquet sur la commode en marbre
.

‘There are ways and means,' said Mrs Rapallo, ‘just as there are variegated tulips and facial surgery.'

Without looking on the
commode en marbre
, behind the silver
bonbonniére
, Theodora expected to hear the
petit paquet
rustle. Instinct suggested she should rescue, if the tulip-coloured stream had not already carried Mrs Rapallo out of reach. So she stood straight, and wrenched from her head a platitude once the property of Fanny Parrott.

‘Oh, but Mrs Rapallo, you have so much to look forward to,' Theodora said. ‘And now that your daughter has arrived. Surely the Principessa will drive over one day soon in the blue Delage?'

Mrs Rapallo composed her skin.

‘It is time, Theodora Goodman, that you and I agreed that the Principessa does not exist.'

And Theodora remembered how the Canova group had intervened.

‘It is a pity,' said Mrs Rapallo, ‘because Gloria had poise, and an epistolary style. Her use of words was almost plastic. After dropping the letters in the box, I could not bear to take away my hand. I was jealous of the iron flap that swallowed Gloria's letters down. How I longed for them to return to me, as they did, of course, almost at once. On such occasions I would hide behind a tamarisk, between the post office and the
papeterie
, so that the trembling of my gloves would not be noticed. Gloria was lovelier then, far more brilliant than even I had conceived,
in creating her. And unlike any child of the bowels, entirely mine.'

‘I cannot believe,' said Theodora.

She had begun to doubt, in fact, whether Queen Marie of Rumania.

‘What do you believe?' Mrs Rapallo asked.

‘I do not know.'

Because now that she swam in Mrs Rapallo's tulip-coloured stream, reason and motive were rinsed out.

‘You must relax, Theodora Goodman,' said Mrs Rapallo. ‘You must relax and float. You will find that figures will evolve, squares, chains, and galops. Sometimes you will place one hand on your hip, sometimes you will feel the hand of your partner in the small of the back. But believe me, the essential is to relax.'

‘Yes, yes,' Theodora cried, made anxious by such gyrations in a full room. ‘But does Rapallo come in?'

‘Oh, yes, he does. Very definitely, yes. On a Thursday morning. They opened the door of the hall. He was selling a patent medicine. He undressed me with his eyes. I was not unwilling. I had fallen for his boots and his sadness. I fell. I fell.'

Mrs Rapallo's teeth bit the pieces.

‘I came to ten years later,' she said, ‘on an iron bedstead, in a cheap hotel in Munich. All he had left behind was a pair of yellow gloves, of which he had been proud, rolled in a ball on the carpet. It was a naked moment, Theodora Goodman, naked as hell.'

In self-preservation Theodora looked for some other object, stuffed bird or
compotier
, on which to concentrate till Elsie Rapallo was once more clothed.

‘However,' Mrs Rapallo said, ‘as I had been endowed with physical agility and mental whalebone, I continued to appear
dans le monde
. I kidded this same
monde
into accepting me for my wealth and wit, though the one had disappeared, and the other had been damaged. In return I was allowed to suffer the knout in all the best drawing-rooms in Europe.'

She touched her bones under the sheet, as if she were surprised not to find them broken.

‘At a pinch I wrote my own invitations,' Mrs Rapallo said, ‘and passed through many doors of which I should never have
had the entrée. In this way I have heard the smiles open on the faces of royalty, and stood so close to the making of history that I have been suffocated by the stink.'

Elsie Rapallo dipped on her tulip-coloured stream that did not respect substance as it flowed. Theodora trod the sodden faces of old letters and the yellow smiles of photographs. Grazed by a random amethyst, dazed by the bobbing of a wax apple that would not drown, she accepted the cardboard collapse of Mrs Rapallo's room. Since it was the natural thing to flow, she flowed.

‘It is lovely, Mrs Rapallo,' Theodora said.

‘But it is not always like this. Sometimes it is a nothing. I hate its paper.'

For a moment of terror she was afraid she might have lost her passport, and groped across the
commode en marbre
to hear the rustle of the
petit paquet
.

‘Sometimes,' Mrs Rapallo smiled, now that she was reassured.

‘Sometimes also you sleep,' Theodora soothed.

‘She does by fits and starts,' said Mrs Rapallo, her same slack smile.

She settled the sheet, that seemed to stir with a separate will.

‘
Dors
,
mon cœur
,' she coaxed. ‘
Dors
,
Mignon
.'