‘The long, dark, slommacky thing in the striped dress? That is Theodora Goodman.’
And Mrs Dinwiddie crumbled her meringue. Perhaps while the music recuperated they might ask her to play, but until then she was without charity.
It could not cut. Theodora ate her supper. The crueller things, she knew, were unspoken. She could not bear Mrs Dinwiddie any grudge. People were grouped in the arbitrary positions of statues. If they also spoke ugliness their words were equally arbitrary. But sometimes a silence or a presence seemed to emanate a will of its own, and this was what she resented. The militant will in an intake of breath. Then she could hate the cut of a nostril, the droop of an eyelid above an eye.
But none of this halted the inevitable.
‘They’ve got to eat,’ Frank said. ‘Where’s Charlie? He can play. Charlie could rock a shearers’ ball. Come on, Charlie, give us a tune while the music’s eating sandwiches.’
So Charlie King, who was a wizard on the keys, began to play smooth mad music, which Fanny Goodman caught in her skirt, the water falling through the outspread tulle, she had to, dancing by herself outside the sound of glasses, in the middle of the empty floor. Fanny Goodman flowed through the blue water, because, of course, by this time it was ‘The Blue Danube’ that Charlie King always played. His hands rippled like a pair of kid gloves. They had no bones. Pouring the suave water that Fanny’s tulle skirt caught.
‘La la le-le lasa,’ sang Fanny Goodman, tossing her head to the swans.
And by this time some of the men had come and stood on the edge. They were strong and important now with food and drink.
‘By Jove, Fanny,’ called Ben McKechnie, ‘I’ll join you.’
He swam out to her, after her. She floated away, but he swam and touched her laughter, the bright glistening of Fanny Goodman. She did not resist or swim against the current. It carried them, the two, held together by the music, their eyes staring intently into each other’s, but ready also at the first sign to navigate treacherous water.
‘And how about Theo?’ Frank said.
She thought that probably Frank had been drinking. His eye was a fiery china, and he bent forward a little as if he were about to touch some small precise object.
‘Shall we, Theo? What do you say? Eh?’ said Frank.
His words lumbered. But he was a blaze of fiery gold she had never seen, and Theodora was burnt.
She touched his arm, and they danced. She was close to his breathing, close to his fire, to the short fierce hairs on his close neck. And the music took them and flung them, the cool and relentless music that they entered, to lose control, that they did not question. Inside the dictatorial stream they were pressed into a dependence on each other that was important.
‘Theo!’ called Fanny. ‘Look at Theo!’
And well she might, because the proud striped skirt of Theodora streamed with fire. Her body bent to the music. Her face was thin with music, down to the bone. She was both released from her own body and imprisoned in the molten gold of Frank Parrott. So that Fanny and Ben McKechnie stopped, and the others that had come out of the supper room looked, and it was something strange and wonderful that they saw, also shameful, because they did not understand.
It was Theo Goodman making an exhibition of herself, Mrs Dinwiddie said.
‘There,’ said Theodora, and her voice came down like two pieces of wood together. ‘We shall stop now, Frank,’ she said.
Although there was still music. Although he still stared out of his own surprise and the motion of what had been her body.
‘I shall go out into the cool,’ said Theodora.
Now he was following her like a bemused calf whom she had fed at intervals with skim milk and won to her in this way.
‘Just as you like, Theo,’ he said.
They went out into the silence of stars and sleeping animals. Her hand picked a leaf and smelled it. It was cold with dew.
‘Jove, Theo, you put me through my paces.’
She laughed. Winding out of the heights, she could not think what turn conversation might take. Whichever way, it hardly mattered.
‘These damn shoes of mine pinch,’ he said.
Because he had to make some motion to hold up the darkness that was pressing down. It was too big. When Frank Parrott was on the road, droving, or for some reason overtaken by darkness, he could not scrape together a few sticks quickly enough, to make a little fire, to sit against.
‘Your forget,’ he said. ‘It’s so long between dances you forget to buy a new pair of shoes. I remember at Singleton, in the autumn, there was a ball, an’ these damn shoes pinched so bad I took them off after supper and danced on my feet.’
Frank Parrott laughed. He laughed at the vision of himself. He had lit his little fire.
‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Where’ve you got to, Theo? What are you thinking about?’
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I was thinking of how I used to go down to the creek, and take off my clothes, and float in the water like a stick. It’s good sometimes to be a stick.’
Of course she was mad, and you could never really forget it was Theo Goodman. Inside they were playing ‘Daisy Bell’. The music had come back.
‘We ought to go in,’ said Frank. ‘Mother’ll come out and tell us we’re wasting the music.’
And now, instead, she followed him along the meeker paths. She watched the shape of his back in the doorway. It was flat and black. After all, she said, it is true, it is mostly flat and black. Even though the music travelled into other worlds.
When it was all over Theodora Goodman touched Mrs Parrott’s kid glove and said it had been a lovely dance.
Yes, yawned Fanny against Father’s shoulder, on the way home. It had been the loveliest dance. And Theo, what did Theo think she was doing, almost throwing Frank Parrott off his feet?
But it was over and done with, the dance that Theodora had waited for and dreaded, the way you can sometimes grasp experience before it is undergone. There was the night, for instance, somewhere early in the summer, when she woke in bed and found that she was not beneath the tree. She had put out her hand to touch the face before the lightning struck, but not the tree. She was holding the faceless body that she had not yet recognized, and the lightning struck deep. Breaking her dream, the house was full of the breathing of people asleep and the pressure of furniture. She got up. It was hot in the passage. It was as suffocating as death. A stale cry came out of the mirror in the passage, choked, as if it just could not scream, even in its agony.
‘What is it, Theodora?’ Father asked, coming out of his room, which was close to the mirror.
‘Nothing, nothing, nothing,’ she almost cried.
She did not want to look at his face.
‘I was just dreaming,’ she said.
‘It’s broken now,’ Father said. ‘Go back to sleep.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it’s broken.’
But this did not obliterate the dream. Although she could not see its shape, it continued to live its life in a state of vague misgiving in her mind.
‘And you?’ she said.
‘It’s thundery. I couldn’t sleep.’
‘Do you remember,’ she said, ‘it was my twelfth birthday, and I was thrown down when lightning struck the tree?’
‘I had forgotten,’ Father said.
‘And the man came. We gave him his dinner round at the side. He said he would come again, but he didn’t.’
‘I had forgotten all about that. Go back to sleep, Theodora.’
Father was going back into his room, and she wanted to stop him, because all the sadness of the world was in the house. There was the possibility that when the door closed, he would suffer the fate of the Man who was Given his Dinner, she might never see him again. But there are occasions on which you cannot stop the closing of the door. It closed. It closed on Father. She was alone in the passage. It would happen. It would be like this in time.