The Aunt's Story (35 page)

In the house above the disintegrating world, light and silence ate into the hard, resisting barriers of reason, hinting at some ultimate moment of clear vision. Theodora experienced a fresh anxiety. She doubted whether flesh was humble enough. She was afraid that the ticking of her eyelid might distort. She was ashamed of the inadequacy of the intermediate furniture. So that she went quickly downstairs, her feet and heart, to do the things she had seen women do in houses. She swept back white ashes from the hearth with an old broom that was still lying in a corner. Unbolting doors and windows she opened the house to the air. With some love she arranged a chair and table which at least were the essential of chair and table. Then she laid sticks and after breaking several matches, which she had in an emergency box in her practical handbag, she made the little tender tongue of fire that would soon consume a great deal of doubt.

Afterwards she sat back on her heels and looked towards the door, where she saw that a man had come, without coughing.

‘Evening,' the man said. ‘It's a steep climb up.'

He came and sat in the chair which Theodora had put.

‘I did not notice,' she said.

‘It's still a stiff climb.'

She heard his breathing, and saw the attitude of his body, both of which suggested he would stay. The man with the relaxed body might even have prior claim to the house.

‘And this chair was always uncomfortable,' he said. ‘It has a little rail with two carved knobs which eat into the back. But perhaps you have not yet experienced this.'

‘Then I am an intruder in your house,' said Theodora.

She sat meekly on her heels beside the fire, which had grown, it had begun to complicate.

‘It is yours,' said the man.

He had not two thoughts on the matter, it appeared. Or else the decisiveness of his words was accentuated by his changing position, to extricate from his pocket a pipe, which he began to fill.

Theodora did not know what to do now, whether she should thank, or whether it was not expected. Whether even the man's largeness of gesture might not be an instance of inverse imposture. But she got up off her heels, as her toes had grown numb. Outside, darkness was thickening, under the black pines, which would soon be solid with darkness, and in the shifting valleys. The little fire possessed the room of the house. It recreated the faces of Theodora Goodman and the man. She sensed her own, but she saw the face of the man, whose skin was ruddy fire.

‘My name is Holstius,' he said, watching the fiery particles of his pipe, which he had lit with a stick.

Theodora touched the table for greater precision.

‘I have seen you somewhere perhaps,' she said. ‘Somewhere on a railway station, or in a hotel.'

‘Possibly,' he said.

But it was a possibility, it seemed, into which he did not intend to go. He drew deeply on his pipe, and the bowl flowered. He was greatly interested in this.

In spite of his detachment Theodora was not conscious of isolation. Looking at Holstius, she remembered the morning on the bridge at Meroë, watching the cold brown water flow, at the shaggy side of the Man who was Given his Dinner, and how at the time she had been infused with a warmth of love that was most thinly separated from expectation of sorrow.

‘They are very thinly divided indeed,' Holstius said. ‘In fact,
you might say that expectation of happiness is expectation of sorrow. The separating membrane is negligible.'

Theodora held the edge of the common table with her fingers. His voice moved her with a deep sadness. He was both detached and close. Because, although he spoke in abstractions, these answered the depths of her being. And what made these sensations of love and sorrow more poignant, actual, wonderful, was that she could have touched the body of Holstius, his thick and muscular, but quiet and soothing, hands, the ruddy skin, the indication of bones, the coarse greyish hair, the eyes, of which the expression was not determined by passion. Walking with her father on the frost at Meroë, or sitting with him in his room, in which the pines were never quite still, she had been impressed in the same way at times by a congruity, a continuity of man. But at times, at times, when expectation exceeded fact. Death had taken George Goodman and put him under marble. Fact corrected expectation. Just as the mind used and disposed of the figments of Mrs Rapallo, and Katina Pavlou, and Sokolnikov. And now Holstius. She watched the rough texture of his coat for the first indications of decay.

You suspect me,' Holstius said.

He spat into the fire. She heard the strong hiss of spittle.

‘I suspect myself,' Theodora said, feeling with her fingers for the grain in the table.

‘Yes,' he said, ‘you have been groping that table like a blind thing for the last ten minutes.'

Then she began to hate the revealing honesty of his face. She dug her nails into the wood.

‘Why,' she asked, ‘am I to be subjected to these tortures? I have reached a stage where they are not bearable.'

Her breath beat. The walls were bending outward under the pressure of the hateful fire. Then, when the table screamed under her nails, he said quietly, ‘Ah, Theodora Goodman, you are torn in two.'

‘What is it,' she asked agony, ‘you expect me to do or say?'

‘I expect you to accept the two irreconcilable halves. Come,' he said, holding out his hand with the unperturbed veins.

She huddled on the boards, beyond hope of protection by convention or personality, but the cloth on the legs of Holstius
had the familiar texture of childhood, and smelled of horses, and leather, and guns. She rested her head against his knees.

‘You cannot reconcile joy and sorrow,' Holstius said. ‘Or flesh and marble, or illusion and reality, or life and death. For this reason, Theodora Goodman, you must accept. And you have already found that one constantly deludes the other into taking fresh shapes, so that there is sometimes little to choose between the reality of illusion and the illusion of reality. Each of your several lives is evidence of this.'

Resistance had gone out of her as she lay, her head against the knees of Holstius, receiving peace, whether it was from his words, and she was not altogether sure that he spoke, or from his hands. His hands touched the bones of her head under the damp hair. They soothed the wounds.

Later it seemed to be morning where her head lay. There was a weal on her cheek where the chair had eaten, numb but not painful, for she was in no such inferior state to experience pain. Light was beginning. It was already yellow, but not yet strong. Theodora turned her head and saw the brown bird with the velvet eye. Even at close quarters it was not critical, and might even have perched on the rail of the chair, of whose inanimacy Theodora Goodman was still a mere extension. Only when she drew her legs across the boards to restore her body to its working shape, the bird lifted its immaculate feet, bunched, trod the air, still undecided whether to settle, drooped, gathered, flirted its wings, opened out, and flew through the door. Then Theodora made the additional effort and stood on her feet. The numbness of her whole body left her with intensely clear vision. The almost empty daylit room had a pleasing innocence of detail and shape.

Walking through the back door, which, she remembered, was the way Holstius had come, she went amongst the trees. They were of a deciduous variety on that side of the house, still green, but washed out, exhausted by the summer. Her feet sank in the soil before water, which trickled out of tufted grass, to fill and overflow from a rusted tin. She took the brown water, burying her face in hands and water, till it ran down, and afterwards, in rivulets, in devious directions, under her dress, against her skin. The water made her laugh. She looked at the world with eyes blurred by water, but a world curiously pure, expectant, undis
torted. She could almost have read a writing on the bark of any given tree.

Later Theodora returned to the house, and in a fit of comfortable conscience brought an old iron bowl that she had seen on a shelf, to fill, to clean the floor of her house. Because Holstius would return some time during the day. She knew. In this she was positive. In fact, she shaded her eyes already against the blue smoke, rising from the valleys and creating a distance. She looked through the trees for the tree walking, which in time would become Holstius. She smiled to herself as she anticipated the recognition of his kind eyes.

But in the meantime she made a widening lake on the board floor of the house, spilling the water generously from the iron basin at her waist. Then without soap, she began to scrub the boards with an old brush. This way she had a certain affinity with the women in houses. She approached close, but respectfully, to the wood, so that she might appreciate its ingrained humility and painful knots. If Holstius had returned at that moment he would have approved, to see her as simple and impervious as a scrubbed board.

Instead, a car came, groaning over stones. Theodora sat on her heels, raising her arm and the scrubbing brush for protection. The car stopped. She heard its abrupt door. She could not sense that this was in any way connected with Holstius. There was anger and exasperation in the dead grass, also a slight diffidence, almost fear, as feet covered the distance to the house. Theodora sat with the scrubbing brush upraised, and her thin mouth. If they intended to break open her peace of mind, from curiosity, or out of malice, she was prepared to defend.

‘Well, for goodness' sakes!'

It was Mrs Johnson. Her sandy hair, hatless, blew at the window sill. Her colourless but anxiously friendly eyes shifted a little to avoid what she might have to see.

‘Oh, it is you,' said Theodora, lowering the brush.

She could not help but love the practical face of Mrs Johnson, which for the moment, at least, was practically helpless. This was not a situation which Mrs Johnson could touch, or to which she could apply a poultice.

Then Mrs Johnson jerked her head, and laughed, and grasped
the window sill, and said, ‘That was a nice thing you did, Miss Pilkington. Walking out on us. I'd got the sheets out, ready to fix your bed. You left your hat too.'

‘It was not very polite,' Theodora admitted.

The sky was intensely blue and majestic behind Mrs Johnson's pathetic head.

‘I should say,' said Mrs Johnson without malice.

She took a breath and came round so that she stood in the doorway.

‘Lucky the kids spotted your tracks this morning. She's gone further up the road, they said. So I said I'd run on up an' see. Before I took the milk.'

Theodora got on her feet to match Mrs Johnson in an attitude of neighbourly intercourse.

‘That was kind of you,' said Theodora. ‘But …'

‘Joe had a hunch you might have looked in here,' Mrs Johnson said. ‘We
hoped
. For your
own
sake.'

She began to look round the room for something to tell her husband.

‘My, though,' she said. ‘I guess you were lonesome.'

Theodora touched the gentle ash with her toe.

‘I made a fire,' she said. ‘I am very happy in this house.'

Mrs Johnson frowned resentfully. She resented Theodora's state of mind, because it was something that she could not understand. Now she shifted round for words, to resist the slow silence of the dead grass.

‘Maybe for a vacation,' said Mrs Johnson with a tight bright laugh. ‘If your tastes lie this way.'

She looked round again at the exasperating house. She looked for some object, from out of the circle of her own life, with which to make an alliance, but all she found was the old iron bowl. This, in connection with Theodora Goodman's obsessive act of scrubbing, was so obscene that her eyes retreated.

‘Well, now, Miss Pilkington,' she said, ‘what are we gonna do? I got the milk to run to Martins'. Then I am at your service. I suggest you come on down to our place. It's brighter there. And comfortable. I'll fix some dinner for you. We got steak for dinner,' she said.

All this was said and said, Theodora realized, because Mrs
Johnson dared not stop. Mrs Johnson would not know the great superiority of stationary objects.

‘Oh, no,' said Theodora flatly and kindly, and because she was touched by the suffering face of Mrs Johnson, she added, ‘Thank you.'

‘But you can't stay
here
!' said Mrs Johnson. ‘Alone. In this darned old shack.'

Theodora saw how Mrs Johnson's soul would have winced and contracted in a similar situation. This was why Mrs Johnson had to protest, why she stood firm, with her bare, sandy legs slightly apart, and tried to wrench the soul of Theodora Goodman into her freckled hands.

‘I can,' Theodora said. ‘I can stay here perfectly well.'

Because she firmly intended that this game for the soul of Theodora Goodman should be finally hers.

‘Besides,' she said, ‘I expect that Holstius will come back, if not this morning, some time during the afternoon.'

‘Holstius? Who the hell?' Mrs Johnson said. ‘Why, his name was Kilvert!'

‘I don't know about that,' said Theodora.

And it was unimportant.

‘Yes, Kilvert went out to the coast eighteen months ago. Shut up the place. Didn't say when he was comin' back. Folks in town heard that Kilvert died.'

Then Mrs Johnson stopped and turned something over in her mind.

‘We don't seem to be gettin' nowhere at all,' she said at last.

Theodora lifted her eyes to see whether Mrs Johnson's face was being sly. It had adopted that fatal flatness which is never quite a disguise.

‘Well,' it said, ‘I got work to do.'

And Mrs Johnson was going out of the door. She walked with long steps over the grass towards the car, of which the bonnet still shimmered, its metal surface broken by a haze of heat. So that Theodora was alone. She embraced with love the silence of her own room. And soon Holstius would come.