There was no time to investigate.
‘Theo, Theo,’ cried Fanny in rising gusts, ‘how terrible it is! And for you, Theo, on your own.’
Her kiss was wet and spasmodic on Theodora’s cheek.
‘Poor dear Mother,’ Fanny cried.
‘It was not very terrible,’ said Theodora. ‘She died in her sleep. I went in. It was like any morning. After the man had pushed the paper under the door. It was like that.’
But Theodora was insensitive.
Fanny cried. Once she had been plump and pretty. Now she was red and fat. She cried because it was expected, and because her clothes were tight, and because it was easier to cry, and because she increased in importance by crying for the dead. She also remembered vaguely a piece of pink coconut ice offered by her mother’s hand. So Fanny cried.
Frank mumbled. It was not so much in sympathy as protest. Here was something to be held off. But there were also greetings to be made. Never very articulate, except in talking sheep, he now damped his few words as a measure of respect. Theodora touched his hand, which was rough and hard. The backs of his hands were covered with red hairs.
‘Sit down, Frank,’ said Theodora. ‘And how is everyone else?’
To thaw the children, who sat stiff with solemnity round their parents, where they had been placed. Now they murmured. They hung their heads. They were still strangers. But they began to fight the situation and come alive.
‘It is not the sort of occasion,’ Fanny said, blowing her nose. ‘But I took the opportunity. The boys must have overcoats. They grow so … FAST.’
Her last word slipped out quite shockingly, beyond control, and she put her face inside her handkerchief and cried. But now it was not so much her mother’s death as the tragedy of domesticity, that avalanche of overcoats and boots.
‘Steady on, Fanny,’ said Frank, who had not experienced the exaltation of grief.
He looked sideways, at no one, and tapped with his yellow boot.
‘George got a cinder in his eye,’ said young Frank.
‘Shut up, Frank,’ said George, and blushed.
‘You did! You did! He put out his head near Mittagong, and it flew in. Mum made a thing with a handkerchief and fished it out.’
‘Shut up,’ cried George. ‘You dope! I’ll kick you in the stomach if you don’t shut up.’
‘Boys!’ said Fanny, only just. ‘You’ve no idea, Theo, what I endure.’
But it was good. Theodora looked at the boys, their hard knees, on which the cuts had healed. The bodies of the boys denied the myth of putrefaction. So that she drew breath quickly, severely, through her nose, as if her contempt and disgust for a tasteless practical joke had been finally justified. She was whole. She was free. And Lou came and sat beside her. Lou did not speak, but she could feel very positively the thin bone of an arm pressed close against her waist.
‘May one go up?’ asked Fanny, her eyebrows sewn together by pain.
‘Yes,’ said Theodora, ‘if you want. Only there is nothing to see. Only the coffin, that is.’
‘Poor dear Mother,’ said Fanny, ‘I would have given so much for a last glimpse.’
Her husband sucked his teeth. It was not regret, but a vastly irritating fragment of ham from a sandwich eaten in the train.
‘I said to Frank,’ said Fanny, ‘as soon as we got your wire, I said, I cannot believe that Mother has passed over without saying good-bye. Didn’t I, Frank?’ she said, because he needed drawing in.
Frank Parrott sat. He was watching his wife prepare to perform some act. His mind lumbered to the club, to the talk of wool clips and stud rams. Now he sat glassily among the women. His hands were heavy on his thighs. The mature Frank Parrott often reminded Theodora of a stuffed ram, once functional within his limits, now fixed and glassy for the rest of time. He was what they call a practical man, a success, but he had not survived.
‘Hold hard, Fanny,’ said Frank, ‘I’m coming too.’
He got himself heavily out of his chair, manipulating his heavy thighs. He would go, not to patronize a coffin, but to pass time in the lavatory. Besides, Theodora made him sidle. To sit with her alone in the same room. Her ugly mug, that was always about to ask something that you could not answer.
So Frank Parrott followed his wife out.
Now the drawing-room was smooth. Bells swam on its surface from across the bay, and the voices of the boys, their shall-and-shan’t, passing and repassing, jostling like wooden boats on summer water.
‘May we play with the brass ball?’ asked Lou.
The brass ball was unfailing.
‘Yes, yes. Please!’ cried young Frank.
So they took the filigree ball and rolled it over the carpet. It was something that Grandmother Goodman had brought from India once, and which, she said, the Indians fill with fire and roll downhill. And although its hollow sphere was now distorted and its metal green, when rolled across the drawing-room carpet the filigree ball still filled with a subtle fire.
‘What do the Indians do it for,’ said young Frank.
‘Yes, why?’ asked George. ‘Aunt Theo, why do they fill the ball with fire?’
But Lou did not ask. She patted the ball.
‘I have no idea,’ said Theodora. ‘I have forgotten. Or perhaps I never knew.’
‘It’s silly,’ said George. Suddenly he wanted to kick it.
‘It’s not,’ said Lou.
Her hands protected not only the Indian ball, but many secret moments of reflected fire. Above her the legs of the boys sprang straight and menacing as concrete towers. George would be a farmer like his father, and young Frank said that he would build bridges. But Lou, who continued to roll the filigree ball, flowed, in which direction you could not tell, and for this Theodora trembled. The boys you could have piled into two heaps of stones. But Lou was as unpredictable as water. Theodora sensed this. The shape of her own life had not been fixed.
Then Fanny had begun to impose herself again. She was already steaming in the passage. Fanny came.
‘Lou,’ she said through her swollen nose, ‘you have torn your pants. Oh dear, oh dear. And crawling about on the carpet. You’ll dirty your knees. Theo,’ she said, ‘where is Frank? I am exhausted. It is the air. The air of Sydney makes blotting paper of me.’
‘But it will improve now. There is a breeze,’ said Theodora, as she had heard other people say.
With the same slightly incredible conviction Frank Parrott was closing the door. She watched his veins, and the way he composed his mouth to resist judgement, whether this was aimed or not. Theodora did not aim at Frank. At most she considered with detached regret the process by which bronze can melt to fat. But he winced under what he believed to be forgiveness.
‘I suppose she made a will, Theo,’ said Frank, to stamp the situation with authority.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘she told me.’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Fanny. ‘But it is always safer to see. These old people, and Mother of course was old. George, Frank, behave yourselves, and put away that brass ball.’
‘We shall see,’ said Theodora. ‘The will is with Mr Clarkson. But, as you know, there was very little to leave. And what there is, she told me, she intended I should have.’
‘Of course,’ Fanny said.
In the wind from the bay the leaves of the Moreton Bay fig were less smooth. The bell from the distant church tolled through tossed trees.
‘No one can deny you deserve it, Theo,’ said Fanny.
No one, that is, but Fanny, in her heart. Her life was a life of full cupboards. She kept them locked. She made inventories of her possessions. She did quick sums on the backs of envelopes, and was both amazed and afraid at the answers that she got. She was afraid that the plenty might diminish, just a little; this made her lie awake at night.