The Aunt's Story (5 page)

‘I once knew an old man,' said Gertie, ‘who learned the Gospel of St Matthew off by heart. He was a storekeeper in Muswellbrook. And he died of intemperance, that old man.'

‘I shall know everything,' Theodora said.

To wrap it up and put it in a box. This is the property of Theodora Goodman. But until this time, things floated out of reach. She put out her hand, they bobbed and were gone. She listened to the voices that murmured the other side of the wall. Or she followed the Syrian as darkness fell, and the Syrian's brown silence did not break, the sky just failed to flow through.

‘How can you know? It's silly,' said Fanny. ‘I shall have a blue silk dress, and a necklace of pearls, and a handsome husband, and six children, and I shall go visiting in the houses of my friends.'

Father once said to Mother that Fanny would always ask the questions that have answers.

And Mother was annoyed and said, ‘Turn your toes out, Theodora. And run and do your hair. You look a fright.'

It was not surprising.

Theodora Goodman was altogether unsurprised. On her twelfth birthday the big oak in front was struck by lightning, and from three hundred yards Theodora was thrown to the ground. Gertie said it was an act of God. But Theodora picked herself up, out of the event, it was one of the things that happened, and which it was still not possible to explain, like Pearl Brawne, and Mother's moods, and the Syrian. So Theodora picked herself up and gave a rather pale laugh, because naturally she had been frightened, and went to look at a calf that had just been born.

It was this same day too, the day of the lightning, that a man came who had been Father's friend once, when Father had been prospecting, it seems. The man was sitting on the veranda, late in the morning, when Theodora walked round.

‘I came to see your father,' the man said.

He had a beard, like a prophet, greyer than Father's, thick and big.

‘Did you?' said Theodora.

‘Yes,' said the man. ‘You had a bit of a storm. That's a bad bit of business.'

He pointed to the tree.

‘That is an act of God,' said Theodora. ‘I was three hundred yards away, but I survived.'

‘It is sometimes like that,' the man said.

And now Theodora decided to sit down, because something warm and close had been established with the man.

‘Perhaps they will ask you to stay to dinner,' she mused, almost as if she did not belong.

‘I dunno,' said the man. ‘Sometimes it's different when they settle down.'

He sounded melancholy. And suddenly the lightning trembled in Theodora, that she had not felt, the lightning that had struck the oak.

‘What's up?' the man asked.

‘Nothing,' said Theodora.

But she continued to tremble.

‘Or if they don't give you dinner, perhaps they will give you some money.'

‘You know a thing or two,' the man said.

‘I know very little,' Theodora replied.

She looked at the man who had come to see Father and knew that he must know a great deal.

‘What do you do?' she asked.

‘I look for gold.'

‘Why?'

‘Because,' he said, ‘it is as good a way of passing your life as any other.'

This sounded funny. It made the walls dissolve, the stone walls of Meroë, as flat as water, so that the people sitting inside were now exposed, treadling a sewing machine, baking a loaf, or adding up accounts. But the man walked on the dissolved walls, and his beard blew.

‘You must be rich,' said Theodora.

‘Why?' asked the man.

Now, in fact, it was his turn.

‘Well,' she said, ‘looking for gold.'

‘But I haven't found very much.'

She would have pitied him, but his eyes, she saw, were pleased. The man laughed. Altogether he was unlike the other people who came to the house, or anyone in the house, except a little like Father.

‘You are poor then?' she said, looking curiously at the fact, to which the man's laughter gave a beautiful clarity.

‘That's the obvious deduction,' he said.

Behind them they could hear the safe sounds of the house.

‘Poor,' said the man, ‘and hoping that your Father, for sentimental reasons, will tell them to dish me up some dinner. My belly's hollow,' he added. ‘And you Father's taking a hell of a time.'

Theodora went inside to see what was happening, and the man continued to sit and kick his rather worn heels.

‘You are a romantic, George,' Mother was saying. ‘Romantic and
ridiculous
, they both begin with r.'

‘It's a pity,' said Father in a tight way, ‘that you never realized this before.'

‘As if I didn't,' said Mother. ‘As if I didn't! I very quickly learned to spell. But, of course, I am tarred a little with the same brush.'

Then she looked at him and laughed, as if it were the least funny thing that had ever happened.

‘Julia,' Father said quickly.

He could not quite find what it was he wanted to say. He took a step forward. You felt that he would have gone farther if it had been anyone else but Mother.

Mother sat on the sofa. She twisted her rings round. She rolled her hands in a tight ball and said, ‘It is no use, George. I refuse to sit down to table with every tramp that comes along. I will not. I will not.'

Then you knew that Mother had won, in spite of Father breathing hard. It was terrible, the strength of Mother. All your own weakness came flowing back. Mother was more terrible than lightning that had struck the tree.

‘But we can give him his dinner,' Theodora dared. ‘We can give it him on the closed veranda. Round the side. Gertie can hand it through the window of the spare room.'

Short of turning her face, to avoid what she could not avoid, what she had just seen, she had to say something, and she said this.

‘Oh, it's you,' said Mother sharply. ‘I did not see you were there. Yes,' she said, ‘Theodora seems to have solved the problem. Let him have it on the closed veranda. Round the side.'

‘Let Gertie hand it through the spare-room window. To the leper,' Father said.

Then he left the room.

But the man who came was given his dinner.

‘You eat an awful lot,' said Fanny.

‘Because my belly's empty,' the man said, as he continued to put into his mouth boiled beef, dumplings, carrots, cabbage, squares of bread, and draughts of tea.

‘I'm hungry,' he said. ‘And I like eating.'

‘I like meringues best,' said Fanny.

‘And you?' said the man to Theodora.

‘I don't know,' she said.

Under cover of the conversation between Fanny and the Man who was Given his Dinner, Theodora had withdrawn, and now she felt shy. She would have preferred the man's silence, or else the cracking of his jaws as he chewed and swallowed the boiled beef. She could not see him eat too much, because his act covered their shame.

‘You're more like your father,' the man said to her. ‘More like your father used to be. We was mates. We went prospecting down Kiandra way. I remember once we got lost, one Easter, in the mountains, when the snow came. There was the ghost of a man in the mountains, they said, who got lost in a snowdrift driving his sheep. We sat all night, your father and I, under the shelter of a big dead tree, listening to the dingoes howl, waiting for the ghost. Cripes, it was cold up there. We had a fire each side. But it was cold. We sat with our arms round each other, and then your father fell asleep.'

‘Did you see the ghost? Did you? I would hate to,' Fanny said.

But the man said, after a little, after he felt like speaking again, ‘Why, no, I didn't see the ghost. And in the morning
your father woke up, and we laughed. The sun was up, and we was sitting on the edge of the blasted track.'

The Man who was Given his Dinner laughed now. He brushed his beard with the back of his hand. Sun fell through the shaggy tree, and things were good to touch.

‘I could tell you a lot of things,' said the man.

He said it, Theodora knew, to her, in spite of Fanny, and Gertie Stepper, who stood at the spare-room window holding the crumbs.

‘Why don't you stay and tell us?' asked Fanny.

But looking at Theodora, the man's mouth opened and closed, as if it was mouthing a great potato. Then at last it closed on words. ‘I got to be making tracks,' he said.

He put on his felt hat, which had blackened round the crown with sweat.

‘You'll be wanting to thank the boss and the missus, said Gertie Stepper out of the window.

‘No,' said the man. ‘I'll just slip along.'

Gertie Stepper went quite red. ‘Well,' she said, ‘at your age, you know best.'

‘And we shall come,' cried Fanny. ‘We'll walk at least as far as the bridge. So that you can tell us things.'

But the man had stopped talking. He looked at his boots as he walked, and he sucked the beef out of his teeth. Till Fanny had to shake his arm.

‘Tell us something,' cried Fanny. ‘Why don't you speak?' she said. ‘Soon we shall have gone.'

But inside the man's silence, Theodora could feel his closeness. The sleeve of his coat touched her cheek. The sleeve of his coat smelt of dust, and mutton fat, and sweat, but it stroked her, and she bit her tongue.

‘Yes,' said the man, ‘it's as good a way of passing your life. So long as it passes. Put it in a house and it stops, it stands still. That's why some take to the mountains, and the others say they're crazy.'

By this time they had come to the bridge just below Meroë, and this year there was quite a lot of water in the creek, there under the bridge it flowed fast. And for a moment they hung over the rails and looked at the water which flowed under, and
they felt good, the man from his full belly, and the children from the solemnity of what they scarcely understood.

‘They say they're crazy,' yawned the man. ‘And perhaps they're right. Though who's crazy and who isn't? Can you tell me that, young Theodora Goodman? I bet you couldn't.'

He looked at her with a fierce eye, of which the fierceness was not for her.

‘I would come if I could,' said Theodora.

‘Yes,' said the man. ‘You would.'

‘Don't be silly,' said Fanny. ‘You're a girl.'

‘I would come,' said Theodora.

Her voice was so heavy she could hardly lift it. Her voice tolled like a leaden bell.

‘You'll see a lot of funny things, Theodora Goodman. You'll see them because you've eyes to see. And they'll break you. But perhaps you'll survive. No girl that was thrown down by lightning on her twelfth birthday, and then got up again, is going to be swallowed easy by rivers of fire.'

And now Theodora began to think that perhaps the man was a little bit mad, but she loved him for his madness even, for it made her warm.

‘Now I must be going,' said the man. ‘And you young ladies walk off home.'

‘Good-bye,' said Fanny, shaking hands. ‘Perhaps you will feel hungry and come again.'

‘I'm inclined to say I'd eat my hat, but perhaps for your sakes, perhaps,' said the man.

‘When?' asked Fanny.

‘August seventeenth, next year,' said the man.

‘Good-bye,' said Theodora.

‘Good-bye,' he said.

When he had gone Theodora realized that he had not looked at her again, but somehow this did not seem to matter. They sat beneath the shaggy tree in the night of snow, and the snow as it fell melted, on entering the circle of their warmth. She rose and fell on the breathing of the tree.

‘What did he mean,' said Fanny, ‘by August seventeenth next year? Do you suppose he will come again?'

‘That is what he said,' said Theodora.

But she knew already that he would not come. In all that she did not know there was this certainty. She began to feel that knowing this might be the answer to many of the mysteries. And she felt afraid for what was prepared. The magpies sang cold in the warm air of Meroë.

W
HEN
they were older girls they were sent to Spofforths', so that the Miss Spofforths might finish what Mother had begun. For Mother sometimes lost her patience and threw the book on the floor. It was an event to leave Meroë and go to board at Spofforths'. Even though it was close enough to drive home on Saturday, it remained a terrible event. Like being forced into a room full of people, and the door locked behind. You could not turn and beat on the door, and tell them to open from the other side, because of the stareful and hushed people sitting in the room. You had simply to face the faces. And this was very awful. Goodmans' pair of brumbies, they used to say in town.

Anyway, Theodora and Fanny Goodman went to Spofforths', and the door closed.

It was a pale grey house, with a drive up to it, with privet hedges either side, and white windows that could not contain the music that flowed perpetually into the garden, the complicated pieces played by older girls. The garden was full of broken music. There were pauses as well as music. The fuchsias tumbled like detached notes waiting to bridge the gap between bars.

Inside, the house smelt of linoleum and boiled rice. It hummed and vibrated with voices, most of the rooms, except the rooms of the Miss Spofforths, where silence hung in limp leaves of dark, sponged plants, stared with the faces of Old Girls from photographs, and rumbled flatulently after lunch. These were the rooms of the Miss Spofforths. Nobody would ever beat the gong.

All the time this dark green shiny silence was very noticeable beside the golden humming in the other rooms. But this too was frightening, everything was frightening, at first. That first afternoon Theodora Goodman wondered whether she would ever fit into a pattern so elaborate and so refined.

Then a coppery girl with white skin came out on to the land
ing and said, ‘Hello, Theo, Fanny. It is fun to think we have been put in the same room.'

It was Grace Parrott, who was a familiar face at least. Theodora remembered her mother's handbag, and the lozenges in the little box that came to Mrs Parrott's rescue when her pale voice could not find the words. And now Grace Parrott was a copper-coloured lozenge which they seized with relief on the landing at Spofforths' and were comforted.

‘We also have Una Russell,' said Grace. ‘She has come from Sydney, for her health. Her father is a jeweller. He is very rich.'

‘Is she all right?' asked Fanny.

‘Why shouldn't she be?' inquired Grace.

But Fanny did not know, or why she had said, except that in desperation she had.

The beds looked very white with their white quilts. Outside the window there was a hawthorn tree. This, decided Theodora, shall be my tree. Screened by its thick quilted white, the words were blurred that the girls rolled into balls with their stockings and put away in drawers.

Una Russell whose father was a jeweller, had a set of silver hairbrushes with irises embossed on the back. Her belt buckle was solid silver, and she wore a turquoise ring.

‘Are there races in this town?' asked Una Russell.

‘There are picnic races at Sorrel Vale,' said Fanny.

‘I'm mad about races,' said Una. ‘Because there's always the chance you may meet someone interesting.'

‘We know all the people in this district,' sighed Grace Parrott.

‘Perhaps,' said Una. ‘But some people start to be interesting all of a sudden.'

The hands of Una Russell had an air of experience, arranging the silver brushes on top of the chest of drawers, that you could not help watch, the pale hands with the turquoise ring.

‘How I hate school,' complained Una. ‘I would like to get married. I read a lovely book about a girl who got married while she was at school, secretly, you see, to a French count.'

‘Are you allowed to read about love?' asked Fanny.

But Una did not hear, and immediately Fanny was glad.

‘Aren't you unpacking, Theo?' asked Grace Parrott.

Because Theodora sat on the quilt in her big straw hat, and
her face was half a brown shadow, the way the brim cut across. The impression was rather strange.

‘You haven't even taken off your hat,' said Una.

She looked at Theodora, sensing something that she would not understand, and possibly something from which she must defend herself, or even hate.

‘No,' said Theodora, quickly wreaking her brown shadow.

Her feet began to move about the room, allowing her to perform the various simple acts of arrival.

‘What shall we be expected to do?' she asked.

‘Nothing today,' said Grace. ‘It is the first afternoon.'

Una Russell continued to look at Theodora, out of her experience, which could find no possible explanation.

‘You'll get used to Theo,' laughed Fanny. ‘She has her ways.'

Life very soon became a ringing of bells, unlike the silent drowsing days at Meroë, where time just slid along the yellow stone, rested, slid, with the lizards and the sun. Because nothing ever happened at Meroë, you could watch the passage of time, devote a whole morning to the falling of a rose. But at Spofforths' time jerked and jangled. Time was a bell. The hours were Music and Sewing and Geography and French. Only at evening, time would ease up; the bell was still, and you could hear an apple thump the earth somewhere in the long grass at the back. Then the world would begin to revolve again, like the great sphere that it is, not a coloured papier mâché thing that jerked and squeaked under Miss Emmy's hand. But the days mostly wore the papier mâché face. They were masked by the Improvement that the three Miss Spofforths dispensed.

‘And now Theodora Goodman will explain habeas corpus to us,' Miss Emmy smiled.

It was a horror, but a bright horror, in Miss Emmy's voice, because Miss Emmy smiled and smiled. Miss Emmy's smile filtered through her face, out of her pleated mouth, her spectacles, and her crumpled skin. It was a smile that had lost its direction long ago. Miss Emmy would have smiled at death.

It was better with Miss Belle. Several girls, sitting in the evening at the open window, soft with the kindness of dusk, said that Miss Belle was lovely. They sighed and peeled grapes.
It was as if life had stood still on the threshold of experience. Whether lovely or not, Miss Belle was lovelier. She wore brown velvet ribbons and a cameo. Her hands, though freckled, lingered emotionally over music. She could not leave a chord. When Miss Belle sat beside the lamp and sewed, it was good to sit beside her, to smell verbena, and to borrow her scissors in the shape of a stork. Her hair was rather vague, it strayed, as she talked about the galleries of Florence and Rome, to which she had had the good fortune to accompany a cousin of her mother's. Once a girl called Lottie Littlejohn had pressed some lily of the valley in a Bible, and in the holidays she had sent the lily of the valley with a letter to Miss Belle. Miss Belle put it in a rosewood box in her quiet room, with the other pressed flowers, the pansies and violets and mignonette, she had received from other girls.

There was the crumpled Miss Emmy, who smiled, and plaited leather for a hobby, and the drifting, musical, travelled Miss Belle. There was also Miss Spofforth, who was the eldest, the headmistress, and the name.

‘Tell me about Miss Spofforth,' said Mrs Goodman. ‘About Miss Spofforth you never speak.'

‘We don't see her very much,' said Theodora. ‘It is difficult to tell.'

‘She seems a most superior woman,' Mrs Goodman said.

‘She is horrid,' said Fanny.

‘Why?'

‘She is so ugly. And so strange.'

Mis Spofforth was an opaque square. Her hair was dark grey, and her skin was thick and brown. The headmistress read prayers, and signed letters, and asked questions about individual welfare if the opportunity occurred.

‘Theodora,' she said, ‘are you quite happy here?'

It was on the stairs.

‘Yes, thank you,' said Theodora. ‘I am well enough.'

If she had answered a question in a sermon she could not have felt more unwise.

Miss Spofforth was murmuring. She had not discovered the secret of unlocking other people, because she herself had never really opened.

‘You must come and talk to me,' Miss Spofforth said. ‘If there is ever anything you want to know.'

To walk inside one of the dark rooms in which Miss Spofforth lived, to sit among the dark, sponged plants, to say: If I could give expression to something that is in me, but which I have not yet hunted down. This is what Miss Spofforth invited, although it was not possible to accept.

Theodora waited for her to go. The meeting on the stairs, which should have been transitory, had stuck. The headmistress was fumbling with a thought that she could not bring out. So that Theodora felt hot, and looked away to hide her own guilt.

Then Miss Spofforth decided, it seemed, to give up, to move. The moments had begun to flow again. And the square dark face looked down and said, ‘They must not put so much polish on the stairs. Somebody will slip.'

Theodora listened to the strong boots of Miss Spofforth squeak away across the polished floor. The distance increased, but it had been great upon the stairs. Sometimes the distance is very great.

I shall never overcome the distances, felt Theodora. And because she was like this, she found consolation in the deal mirror in the room for four. When she was alone she spoke to the face that had now begun to form, its bone. Since she had come to Spofforths' Theodora Goodman had begun to take shape, for what, if anything, she had not yet discovered, and for this reason she could sometimes suffocate. Her breath dimmed the mirror-face, the dark eyes asking the unanswerable questions. Because it was the face to which nothing had yet happened, it could not take its final shape. It was a vessel waiting for experience to fill it, and then the face finally would show.

‘For goodness' sake, looking in the mirror!' said Una Russell, coming in.

Una Russell hated Theodora. She could not understand her silences.

‘Yes,' said Theodora. ‘I do not like my face.'

‘But you look,' said Una.

‘I sometimes wonder.'

‘My mother once knew a very ugly woman who married an Englishman. He had a large house in the country. She did very well.'

‘I don't want to marry,' said Theodora.

‘Why ever not? There is nothing else to do.'

‘I want to do nothing yet. I want to see.'

‘If you are not careful you will miss the bus,' said Una Russell, not that it really mattered if Theodora Goodman should become what she would become.

Una Russell went out of the room, and her bangles expressed her contempt.

Theodora had begun to accept both the contempt and the distances. Because there were also the moments of insight, whether with Father, or the Man who was Given his Dinner, or even with the Syrian. And sometimes the hawthorn tree invaded the room. Its greenish light lay on the boards, and the room was lit with boughs. This made it more than tolerable.

Evenings, the others went out into the garden, where the dusk was full of hot laughter, and the fuchsias smouldered. The girls strolled through the long grass, coiled, and knit together by their words and arms, and the solid swirl of their skirts mowing the grass. But Theodora remained behind on the steps, a finger thoughtful on her mouth. She would go down soon, not now, but later. And it was not unpleasant on the steps, to smell summer at a distance, with perhaps Miss Belle playing Schumann through an open window.

One evening Theodora saw the girl who was called Violet Adams slip through the trees. She saw her blouse amongst the apple trees, and she had sometimes noticed that Violet Adams stayed alone. In the darkness her blouse would dwindle, or suddenly stand out, farther, and then closer, like some note that Miss Belle could not bear to let escape into the darker background of the music. So the white blouse recurred. And finally there was Violet Adams' face.

‘What,' said Violet, ‘you still there, Theodora?'

Because she had been thinking of other things, of some importance and intensity, her voice was condescending and remote. She could not believe in the presence of anything so remote as Theodora Goodman. But she was not unkind.

‘I might say the same,' said Theodora. ‘I watched you for a long time.'

‘I went there to be by myself,' Violet said. ‘I felt sad. But it was lovely. I was reading poetry upstairs. I was reading Tennyson,' she said.

And suddenly the voice and the presence of Violet Adams, if not her rather insipid words, but her white blouse in the apple trees, with the fragments of music that fell from Miss Belle's hands, swept over Theodora, and she wanted to take, and touch, and join together all these sensations and make them palpable and whole.

But instead she put her arm round Violet's waist and said, ‘Shall we walk a little more?'

‘Why not?' Violet sighed.

Theodora could feel Violet's sigh break against her shoulder, out of the warm blouse, which was adrift again among the apple trees. Only now there was a second white note which the dark mouth of the music just failed to swallow down.

‘Do you write poetry?' asked Violet Adams.

‘I never have,' said Theodora.

‘I do. I write love poetry,' Violet said.

‘Have you ever been in love?'

‘No, but it isn't necessary,' said Violet. ‘Not if you have the feeling.'

Violet's face was white. She smelt of scented soap. Her eyes were like grey moths that had escaped out of the apple trees. Theodora could feel her own humility, round Violet's thin waist her apologizing arm.

‘I would like to write a poem,' said Theodora. But her mouth closed. She could not describe its immensity.

‘Yes?' asked Violet quickly, because she wanted to talk about herself.

‘I would write a poem about rocks,' said Theodora. Her voice beat her cruelly.

‘About
rocks
!' said Violet. ‘Why ever rocks?'