PART FIVE
10
THAT SUMMER the structure of Xanadu, which had already entered into a conspiracy with nature, opened still farther. Creatures were admitted that had never been inside before, and what had hitherto appeared to be a curtain, loosely woven of light and leaves, was, in fact, seen to be a wall. That which had been hung for privacy, might in the end, it now seemed, stand solider than the substance of stone and mortar which it had been its duty to conceal. One Tuesday afternoon, while Mrs Jolley was gone on an errand, of which the end was terribly suspicious, and while Miss Hare herself was walking through the great rooms, for no other purpose than to associate with the many objects and images with which they and her memory were stuffed full, the brindled woman thought she had begun to hear a sound. From where she listened it was faint but sure, although whether it was coming from a great depth, or horizontal distance, it was quite impossible to tell. It was all around and under her: the grey sound that is given out by tunnels, and the mouths of elephants, and sleepers turning in a dream, and earth falling in a veil from a considerable height. As soon as Miss Hare began to suspect, she held her fingers in her ears. As if that might stop it. Though she knew it would not. For she, too, was rocking and trembling. She had always imagined that, when it happened, it would come as a blast of trumpets, or the shudder of a bronze gong, with herself the core of the vibrating metal. But here it was, little more than a sighing of dust, and at the end, the sound of a large, but unmistakable bone which had given way under pressure. (She had always cried and protested when men were breaking the necks of rabbits, as she waited for the final sound of cracking.) Then it was over. And she had survived. Perhaps Xanadu had not yet fallen. At once Miss Hare began to run through her house to discover to what extent it had suffered. She was quite demented. Although shadow prevailed in the shuttered rooms, a yellow, rubbery light would belly suddenly out through the glass panels of some of the doors, and her figure flickered fearfully. She was more than ever striped, brown, or red, with patches of a clown's white, as she ran to catch the proud spirit, that had fallen, that could still, she hoped, be falling from the height of the trapeze. She ran helter-skelter, and her stumpy, rather grubby fingers were stretched out, tighter than nets. But small. In the drawing-room she found the first serious evidence of damage-in the drawing-room in which ladies in openwork dresses had accepted tea in Lowestoft cups, and told stories of the voyage out, and dancers had rested between waltzes, on the worn step that leads to matrimony, and her parents had failed to escape each other by hiding behind objects of virtu. It was on the drawing-room side that the foundations of Xanadu were now undeniably, visibly sunk. Where there had been a fissure before, where no more than a branch had been able to finger its way inside, a whole victorious segment of light had replaced the solid plaster and stone. Leaves were plapping and hesitating, advancing and retreating, in whispers and explosions of green. Walls were revealed mottled with chlorosis. The scurf of moss had fallen from an oaken shoulder onto the rags of Italian damask. And dust, dust. There was a newer kind, the colour of familiar biscuit, yet smelling of concealment and age. Now spilled freshly out. It lay on the boards together with the grey domestic dust, a thin bed for some future crumbling of stone. Miss Hare stood looking. Then she picked up a fragment of her house, just about the size of a fist, and threw it at a malachite urn which had been her parents' pride. The moment of impact, however, was somewhat disappointing. The sound it produced was even dulclass="underline" almost that of a stone striking on composition, or wood. Yet, the urn had been genuinely mineral-so cold, and dense, and unresponsive-her skin had always assured her as a child, as well as on lonely occasions in after life. Her mouth, which was working to solve, suddenly subsided on the teeth. All problems had always given way to birds, and here were several, aimed practically at her. Released from the tapestry of light and leaves, the birds whirred and wheeled into life inside the burst drawing-room. What kind, Miss Hare could not have told; names were not of interest. But the plump, shiny, maculated birds, neither black nor grey, but of a common bird colour, were familiar as her own instinct for air and twigs. And one bird touched her deeply, clinging clumsily to a cornice. Confusion had robbed it of its grace, making it a blunt thing, of ruffled gills. From far below, the woman willed the frightened creature back into its element, where the reunited formation completed a figure to the approving motions of her head. She watched them quiver for an instant in flight, wired, it appeared, for inclusion in the museum of her mind. But they were gone, of course. She was left with the shimmer of brocaded light that hung upon the rent in the wall. So Miss Hare, too, went at last, nodding her papier-mâche head. She became her most clumsily obscene whenever she ceased to control her own movements, as now, when she was moved, rather, through the wretched house, as much her doom as her property. So she loomed on the stairs, and in unaccountable passages. Pierced by the anxious brooches that barely held the skin together, the folds of her throat were choking her. Her ankles were elephantine in their plodding. She trailed a sad bladder, filled with the heaviest, coldest sand. Mrs Jolley, when she returned, found her employer occupied with the jigsaw pieces of a bathroom floor. "This is where you are!" the housekeeper exclaimed, as if it had not been obvious. She was angry, but intended to be cold and firm. Miss Hare also was trusting to appearance to hide her true state, of despondency and fear. At least she had the advantage of being seated on the floor, beneath her protective wicker hat. "Why shouldn't I be here?" she answered calmly. "Or there? Or anywhere?" "I have never seen this room before," complained Mrs Jolley, inspecting her surroundings. Miss Hare produced a key: black, of elegant design. "There was no reason why you should have. This was my parents' bathroom. I had almost forgotten about it myself. It was considered very lovely. Italian workmen came to make it." "Gingerbread!" Mrs Jolley snorted. "Give me modern plumbing!" "Oh, plumbing!" said Miss Hare. "That is a different matter." She had begun to feel tired. "Everyone will have plumbing soon. They will be flushed right out." "What is that thing?" Mrs Jolley asked, and pointed with her toe at the part of the floor with which her employer had been occupied. "I would prefer not to say," Miss Hare replied. Then Mrs Jolley laughed. Because she knew. "It is a goat," she said, perverting the word softly in her mouth. "What a decoration for a person's bathroom! A black goat! looking at you!" "No," said Miss Hare, with a firm movement of her jaw, "it would not appeal to you. Goats are perhaps the animals which see the truth most clearly." Mrs Jolley could not control her irritation. In fact, where her toe struck the mosaic, there was a rush of loose tesserae across the uneven surface of the floor. "Oh, I know!" she cried. "You have to throw up at me, don't you, on account of that old goat of yours. The one that got burnt. That you told me of. And nobody to blame." Miss Hare was soothing the scattered tesserae with her freckled hand. "Have you ever seen an armadillo?" she asked. "No." Mrs Jolley was very angry. "Perhaps you have, though, and don't know it!" Miss Hare laughed. "What," asked Mrs Jolley, "is an armerdiller?" "It is an animal which, I believe, is practically invulnerable. It _can__ be _killed__, of course. Anything can be _killed__. Because I once saw an armadillo that somebody had made into a basket." Then she looked up at her companion with such an expression that the latter attempted afterwards to describe it to Mrs Flack. "I know nothing about any such things," the housekeeper said rather primly. "And don't like saucy answers, particularly from those who I have obliged." Miss Hare was filling her pockets with the fragments of mosaic. "Have you engaged a strong boy to carry your box?" she asked. "Then there is no need to tell you!" said Mrs Jolley. But was taken aback. And, as a lady of principle, had to defend herself. "Yes," she said. "I have decided to terminate my service. You cannot expect me," she said, "to risk my neck in a house that is falling down." "You have seen it, then? The drawing-room?" "I'll say I have!" "Perhaps even foresaw-to have made your arrangements in advance, on the very afternoon!" Miss Hare laughed. Momentarily she seemed to have recovered her balance. The pocketfuls of tesserae rattled jollily when slapped. She had never cared for sweets, but would often suck a smooth pebble. "I don't propose to become involved in arguments," Mrs Jolley announced. "I am giving notice. That is all. Though have never done so in a bathroom. That is"-she stumbled-"I mean to say I have never been compelled to discuss matters of importance in any sort of a convenience." Miss Hare began to scramble up. "You will go, I suppose, to Mrs Flack." Mrs Jolley blushed. "For the time being," she admitted. "For life, I expect," Miss Hare murmured. Mrs Jolley hesitated. "It is very comfortable," she said. But did falter slightly. "What makes you say," she asked, "you speak as if"-she raised her voice-"as if I was not my own mistress." Miss Hare, who had arranged her crumpled skirt, was looking, not at Mrs Jolley. "There is a point," she said, "where we do not, cannot move any farther. There is a point at which there is no point. Who knows, perhaps you have reached it. And your friend is so kind. And her eiderdown, you say, is pale blue." "But it may suit me to move," Mrs Jolley insisted, stretching her neck. "You will see no more in other parts-I know because they took me as a girl-than you will from Mrs Flack's. And through Mrs Flack's eyes. The two of you will sit in Mrs Flack's _lounge__, watching us behave. Even directing us." "Have you met her?" "No. But I know her." "You have seen her at the post-office, perhaps?" "Not to my knowledge," Miss Hare replied. "I have seen her in the undergrowth. But you do not go there, of course. Amongst the black sods of rotting leaves. And in the ruins of the little shed in which my poor goat got burnt up. And in my father's eyes. All bad things have a family resemblance, Mrs Jolley, and are easily recognizable. I would recognize Mrs Flack however often she changed her hat. I can smell her when you do not mention her by name." Mrs Jolley had begun by now to leave the bathroom. Although she had arranged for her belongings to be fetched, she had till the following day to put in. If only she could think of some temporary occupation of a known and mechanical kind. In her distraction, she was reiterating, "Mad! Mad!" To preserve her own sanity. "A sad, bad word." Miss Hare sighed. They were walking down the passages in single file. "Because it leaves out half," she added. They were always walking, with Mrs Jolley at the head, with a careful nonchalance, in case the runners should slip from under them. "All right, then," Mrs Jolley gasped. "You can let me alone, though. We could trot out words till the Judgment, and not get anywhere at all. I am going to my room, thank you." But Miss Hare could not tear herself away. She was not so good that she was not fascinated by bad. If they had come across a dead baby lying on that window-sill, she would not have asked herself the reason why, before she had examined the little crimped fingers and limp-violet attitude. She would probably have touched it to see whether it felt of rubber. Only afterwards she would have realized that she, too, had escaped strangling by a miracle. But now they were walking and walking through the passages of Xanadu, and Mrs Jolley's behind was quaking visibly. It seemed as though her corset could do nothing more for her. "And so soft at times," Miss Hare meditated. And pursued. "Soft what?" Mrs Jolley's breath was sucked right in. She would not turn, though. "Eiderdowns," Miss Hare clattered. "Evil, evil eiderdowns!" Rounding a corner Mrs Jolley realized she had overshot the flight of stairs which led higher to her room. And here were the passages of Xanadu, endless before her. Almost at the same moment a pampas wand struck her on the mouth, from a console table, as they passed, and immediately she was turned to stone. But running, running. Her cold, stone legs must never stop. "If you must keep on about evil," she called back, her voice close to brass, or laughter, "I can remind you of some of the things that go on in this town, to say nothing of house. Or _orchard__!" She almost screeched, and her skirt too. While Miss Hare appeared to move on pads of kapok. Or else it was the dust from which the carpets were never free. "I am not surprised," Miss Hare gasped at last. "That you found out. One did expect." "And with a dirty Jew!" Miss Hare was red rage itself. She could not see for the sense of injustice which was rising green out of her. Towering in the perpendicular, it burst into a flower of sparks, like some obscene firework released from the dark of memory. "My _what__ Jew?" The words were choking. "Dirty? What is true, then? My kind man! My good! Then I am offal, offal! Green, putrefying, out of old, starved sheep. Worse, worse! Though not so bad as some. Offal is cleaner than dishonest women. What is lowest of all? You could tell me! Some women! Lower, even. Some women's shit!" So her memory spat, and the brown word plastered the accuser's back. Mrs Jolley, of course, could only stop her ears with the wax of unbelief. When she had opened them again, her white lips pissed back, "Who did the Jews crucify?" "The Jew!" Miss Hare panted. "I know that. Because Peg used to tell me. It was horrible. And blood running out of his hands, and down his poor side. I have never allowed myself to think about it." In the absence of what she might have kissed, she crammed her knuckles into her mouth. If all the windows had shattered, and the splinters entered her, she could have borne that. But