‘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.
4
WHEN Theodora returned home, and Fanny followed, after a term or two, this was the beginning of a fresh phase at Meroã. 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 Meroã had heaved out their black volcanic rock, and closed, and the rock remained, dead, suggestive but dead. This was no longer Meroã. 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 Meroã, 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 Meroã, 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 Meroã 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.